After a few more short turns, he pulled up along a row of beautiful homes in the heart of Harrington Gardens. I felt my jaw thunk into my lap. The narrow mansions were built of terra-cotta brick with ornate stone facings and stone mullioned windows.
“Wow,” I breathed, and Andre laughed.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I did a little research and found out that Lord and Lady Ellis’s Dutch colonial home was built in 1883 by the architects Ernest George and Peto for the second son of the Earl of Leicester.”
“No wonder Lady Ellis seems to think she’s all that,” I said. “I would, too, if I lived here.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Andre said. “Being a toff is not your style.”
I took that as a compliment.
We stepped out of the car, and while Andre unloaded his equipment bags, I stared up at the four-story, pointy-roofed mansion with awe. A stone angel peered down at me from the third floor. Its chubby face was so much more pleasant than the sharp-beaked raven on top of Mim’s wardrobe that I made a mental note to see if the raven could be carved to look more like a fat cherub. Viv would never go for it, of course, but it made me smile to think of it.
The front door was recessed within a stone archway. A thick wooden door was set back, and I led the way up the three short steps into the alcove with Andre on my heels hoisting his bags onto his shoulder as we went.
I rang the bell, which I could hear echoing in the house. Andre rocked back and forth on his heels while we waited. I had to curb the urge to hum or whistle. I’m not very good at waiting, Harrison would probably say this was another sign of my lack of impulse control.
The door opened and a stout woman in sensible black shoes and a severe black dress that covered her from neck to knee greeted us.
“Good morning,” she said. She peered at us through rimless glasses that perched on the end of her long, thin nose. “You are the photographer and the hat-shop girl.”
It was dismissive the way she said it, and it wasn’t just her broad accent that made it sound so. Calling me a “hat-shop girl” made me feel as if she was calling me a “coat-check girl,” and I wondered if she thought we should have used the servants’ entrance.
“I’m Ms. Parker and this is my associate Mr. Eisel,” I said. “I believe Lady Ellis is expecting us.”
The woman reared her head back as if surprised that I wasn’t as easily intimidated as she’d thought. I felt like telling her that in the hotel I once worked in I was in charge of an entire fleet of chambermaids and I certainly was not going to take any attitude from a housekeeper, but I refrained.
“Follow me,” the woman said, and turned on her heel to lead the way.
I gestured to Andre to go first, so I could shut the door behind him. For such a stout lady, the housekeeper moved at a solid clip, and I had to hurry up the short steps and across the marble floor of the reception hall to catch up to her. I barely had a chance to take in the white walls, which were rectangles of wainscoting that reached from floor to ceiling with a brilliant crystal chandelier overhead.
The housekeeper, gargoyle, what have you, led the way into a narrow lift. Andre and I squeezed in after her and she pushed the button for the second floor. I expected it to lurch and creak but it was a smooth ride, and we arrived in seconds on the second floor.
“Wait here, please, whilst I announce you,” she said.
We waited in another receiving area while she went through a large door on the left.
“Cheery old gal, isn’t she?” Andre asked.
“A regular beam of sunshine,” I agreed.
Again, Andre rocked on his heels. This time, I did hum. It was equal parts nerves and boredom. I was stressed that the shoot go well and Lady Ellis be satisfied, but I was also anxious about being gone from the shop all morning and leaving Fee in charge.
Of course, if Viv were here, I would not be feeling so edgy. In fact, if Viv had been here from the beginning, we never would have had the kerfuffle of me not being able to find Lady Ellis’s hat and getting roped into this photo shoot.
Honestly, I was becoming torn between rage at and worry for Viv. My Aunt Grace had forwarded the e-mail that Viv had sent her, but of course, it didn’t say where she was or when she’d be back, just that her phone was out of range and she had little to no access to the Internet. I swear I could just wring her neck.
Just when I was about to ask Andre what he thought might be taking them so long, a shriek sounded from the door the housekeeper had just gone through. I exchanged a startled glance with Andre.
“Mouse?” I asked.
“Ew, I hate vermin,” he said. He clutched his equipment to his chest and stood on his tippy toes as if this would elevate him out of the fuzzy critter’s climbing range.
The door to the room was yanked open and the housekeeper staggered out. Her face was deathly white and she slumped against the wall.
“Lady Ellis is . . . dead!” she cried and then she fainted with a crash that shook the floor.
“Oh my god!” Andre shrieked in a pitch so high I didn’t think I could reach it if I tried.
“Call an ambulance and the police,” I said. “She may have given herself a concussion. And don’t move her. I’ll go check on Lady Ellis.”
Andre dumped his equipment on the floor and began scrambling in his pants pocket for his phone.
I hurried through the door into an enormous bedroom done in regal shades of purple and gold. My brain refused to acknowledge what the housekeeper had said. Surely Lady Ellis was just asleep. She was young. How could she be dead? I glanced at the bed first, but it was neatly made up with a large mass of throw pillows.
I turned and noticed a sitting area in front of two French doors that opened up onto a balcony. The small couch and matching wing chairs were empty and the doors to the terrace were shut. I crossed the room looking around the floor for any evidence of Lady Ellis. I was about to leave when I noticed another door that opened into a dressing room.
I could see that the lights were on inside and as I stepped into the room, I noted that it was larger than my bedroom in Mim’s house. My gaze swept down from the racks of clothing to the forest-green carpet and there, lying on the floor just beyond the velvet chaise lounge, I saw the pale, cold form of Lady Ellis, sprawled in the center of the room, wearing nothing but the hat Viv had created for her.
Chapter 18
“Lady Ellis!” I cried. She didn’t respond.
I stood frozen in the doorway. It felt as though my heart had locked up on a beat and I moved forward on legs that were operating on muscle memory instead of strength. Working at the hotel, we were required to know the basics of first response. I sifted through my gray matter, trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to do.
And then it came to me in a brain flash that looked remarkably like the PowerPoint we’d had to sit through. Assess victim’s responsiveness. Well, she hadn’t answered me, so that was none. Check for an obstructed air passage. Okay, I moved to stand beside her now, but as I looked down, I felt bile splash up against the back of my throat. There would be no need to check for an obstruction.
She was lying on her left side in a pool of blood that had been absorbed into the deep-green carpet. Her right hand was clutching a bloody knife as if she had just pulled it from her side before she collapsed. Her eyes stared vacantly up at me and I forced myself to kneel and check the pulse point in her neck just to be absolutely sure.
Her skin was cold and hard. Lady Ellis was dead.
“Help is on the way!” Andre cried as he raced into the room behind me.
“Don’t come in here!”
I turned to hold him off by putting my hand up, but I was too late. He’d come in already. He took one look at Lady Ellis and spun around racing back into the hallway, where I heard him retch.
Amazingly, the housekeeper was roused by the sound of Andre vomiting into what looked to be an extraordinarily expensive vase. Tears coursed down her cheeks and she was shaking
.
“Are you all right, Mrs.—?” I asked.
“Stone,” she replied. She glanced back at the bedroom door. “Lady Ellis—”
“Is dead. The police are on their way,” I said.
“Oh.” Mrs. Stone let out a moan and I looked at Andre.
He had finally pulled his head out of the vase.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He just looked at me as if there really was no answer to that question. I couldn’t argue that.
There was a pounding knock on the door below. I hoped it was the ambulance people and hurried toward the stairs across from the lift. I ran down the two flights until I was in the reception hall. I crossed to the door and opened it.
Two people, a middle-aged man and a young woman, both wearing dark green uniforms with fancy patches on their left sides and the initials NHS on the right stood in the doorway.
“Upstairs,” I said. “Two flights. An older woman fainted and, well, there’s something else.”
“Are you all right?” The woman asked me as the man hurried past me up the stairs.
I shook my head. “But it’s not me who needs care. Please upstairs hurry.”
I knew the shock of the past few minutes was kicking in as my speech was becoming disjointed. The woman frowned and rushed past me to follow her colleague.
I wasn’t sure whether to follow them or to wait for the police to show up. A knock on the door made the debate irrelevant.
A uniformed officer, a constable, was at the door. He was young with a round face and concerned eyes. He was wearing the traditional rounded hat with his badge on the front of it. Mim always liked those hats. His uniform consisted of dark pants, a short-sleeved, white dress shirt with a dark gray vest over it which carried a radio on his shoulder and a Metropolitan Police patch on his left front.
“Upstairs, second floor, hurry,” I said and pointed.
At this point, that was about all I could get out. To his credit, he asked no further questions but took the stairs at a run, yanking the radio out of his shoulder as he went.
He was gone only moments when another constable appeared. He, too, went upstairs, obviously in communication with his colleague. I waited in the hall uncertain of what to do.
Much like a middle-aged lady, the house was well cushioned with years of living. I heard no noise coming from above and was grateful.
The second constable reappeared, looking pale and shaken. He had a long face and he had pushed his hat back as if trying to get some oxygen to his head.
“I’ll need to ask you some questions, ma’am,” he said.
I nodded. There wasn’t much I could tell him, but I was willing to try. We began with my name and why I was here, and then I gave him a brief description of the events that led up to us finding Lady Ellis.
His partner’s voice sounded in his radio and he excused himself to go back upstairs.
Andre came down the stairs and stayed with me in the reception hall. He looked pretty weak and shaky, so we huddled together, feeling like intruders in the drama that was unfolding.
I had left the door open after the second constable had arrived, knowing that more would be coming and that I didn’t really want to be the designated greeter.
Sure enough, in minutes two plainclothes detective inspectors arrived. I was shocked to see that one of them was Inspector Franks.
“Ms. Parker,” he said.
“Inspector Franks,” I said. I was taken aback. What were the odds that he would be here? And then I had a horrible thought, and I felt all of the blood drain from my face as if someone had pulled a plug.
“Is it Vivian?” I asked. My voice was shaky. “Did you hear something about my cousin?”
“Oh, no!” He held out his hands in a “stop” gesture as if he could wave me away from the bad direction my thoughts were going. “The Kensington Borough includes Kensington, Chelsea and Notting Hill. I just happened to be at the Kensington Station when the call came in. When I heard your name over the radio, I took the call.”
I thought I saw him give me a speculative glance, but then he continued, “I’m sorry. I haven’t heard anything about your cousin.”
“Oh.” The air whooshed out of my lungs and I felt Andre’s arm brace me around the waist.
“Sit, Scarlett, before you fall over,” he said.
He led me to a padded bench in the corner and I sat, feeling dizzy and a bit like vomiting myself. I briefly wondered what Andre had done with the vase but then I didn’t want to know.
“This is my colleague, Inspector Simms,” Franks said.
I glanced up and gave him a faint smile. He was considerably younger than Franks and was built solid. He had a thick head of brown hair, ruddy cheeks and pale brown eyes under eyebrows that met in the middle, forming a unibrow. He looked very forbidding, which I supposed was a good thing for a detective inspector.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Franks asked.
I let Andre take the lead, and he explained that we had come to take photographs of Lady Ellis and had found her “in her unfortunate condition.” I had never thought of being stabbed to death in such polite terms, and I gave him a look.
“She was knifed,” I said. “Through the heart.”
As I said the words, Andre blanched and made a gurgling noise in his throat like he might be sick again, so I pulled him down to sit beside me and had him place his head between his knees.
“Simms, go up and have a look, I’ll join you shortly,” Inspector Franks instructed.
The younger of the two detectives disappeared up the stairs while Franks turned to me.
“Ms. Parker, may I ask you a few questions?”
“Certainly.” I nodded. I figured the sooner they were done with us the sooner we could get out of there. Honestly, the whole experience was giving me a case of the wiggins.
“When did you last speak to Lady Ellis?” he asked.
“Tuesday night,” I said. “She came by the shop and picked up her hat. There was a bit of an issue because I couldn’t find it at first, but then I did, and she agreed to have her photo taken.”
He nodded and ran his index finger and his thumb over his mustache as he considered his next question. “Mr. Eisel, you’re the photographer?”
“Yes, I own a studio in Notting Hill, near Scarlett’s shop. She asked me to take the pictures, and I agreed because Lady Ellis said we could use the photos for publicity purposes.”
Franks raised an eyebrow as if that didn’t seem quite right. I couldn’t fault his logic. This wasn’t the sort of house where one expected the resident to go along with being photographed unless it was for the society page.
“I only met Lady Ellis the one time,” I said. I was picking my words extremely carefully, and he leaned closer, listening attentively. “But she struck me as being someone who valued appearances very highly.”
He leaned back and studied me. He gave me a nod and I knew he understood exactly what I was saying, that Lady Ellis had been quite vain.
“Can you two wait here?” he asked. “I may have more questions.”
“Of course,” I said.
Inspector Franks turned and headed up the stairs.
Andre and I sat quietly for a moment and then I said, “‘Unfortunate condition,’ really? Chicken pox is an ‘unfortunate condition.’”
“I didn’t want to overstate it,” he said. He sounded a bit defensive.
“Fat chance of that,” I said. “What would you call a shooting, I wonder, a bellyache?”
“No,” he protested. “I would probably say they had lead poisoning.”
My mouth popped open, and then I snorted. Andre looked back at me with an expression of comical horror on his face, causing me to snort again, which made him laugh. This made me chuckle so I clapped a hand over my mouth which made him laugh and clap a hand over his mouth, too. We turned away from each other, knowing that eye contact would probably set us off again.
“All right, Scarlett?�
�� he said after a moment.
“We’re going to blame that on hysterics,” I said.
“Agreed, it was terribly bad form,” he said.
I cautiously turned back to face him. We glanced at each other and we both nodded. We were okay now.
“I wonder how the housekeeper is faring,” I said.
“I can’t believe she didn’t hurt herself,” Andre said. “Mrs. Stone certainly hit the floor like twenty stone.”
I twisted my mouth to keep from smiling and gave him a quelling look for the hideous play on words.
“Should we go up?” he asked. “I need to get my equipment and get back to the shop. Plus, sitting here is giving me the crawlies.”
“I don’t suppose there can be much more for them to ask us,” I said.
Together we made our way up the stairs. The constables and the detectives were huddled together while the paramedics seemed to be finished with Mrs. Stone. They passed us at the top of the stairs as they were on the way down.
Inspector Franks looked grim.
Andre and I waited uncertainly. I met Mrs. Stone’s gaze and crossed over to where she sat, looking distraught.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Thank you, miss, but no,” she said.
She looked as if she would be undone by the kindness, and I reached down and patted her shoulder. She waited a moment and then patted my hand in return.
“Ms. Parker,” Detective Franks called me over. “When you went into the dressing room, did you touch anything?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Well, I’ve been trained in first aid, so I did check her pulse point in her neck, but that was it. I didn’t move her or touch anything.”
“And when you went in she was unclothed?”
“Yes,” I said. “Except for the hat.”
“And that is your hat?” he asked. His sharp brown eyes were trained on me like two laser points on my face.
“Not mine, no,” I said. I didn’t mean to be obtuse, I was just hitting overload and not processing as well I should have been.
Cloche and Dagger Page 9
