by Mike Ashley
Second best, of course, was a concept far beyond the scope of Fizzy Potter and, along the banquette, Bubbles was slipping her Cartier-encrusted wrist through Teddy Hardcastle’s arm.
“I say, were you really the youngest captain in the Great War, Squiffy?”
Any closer, dammit, and she’d be a tattoo.
“Too jolly right he was,” Marriott boomed. “Gave him a gong for it, too.”
Hardcastle spiked his rebellious fringe out of his eyes, but made no effort to prise the limpet away.
“Take no notice of Marriott,” he told Bubbles, with a flash of lopsided grin. “By the time I joined up they were running out of men. Another six months and they’d have made a machine gun captain.”
“Don’t be so damned modest, man,” Marriott snorted. “It’s the same with his bookbinding commissions, y’know, Bubbs. All that inlaying of coloured leather, gold fillets, those woss-names in enamelled porcelain you mount on the covers—”
“Plaques.”
“Plaques, thank you, and that’s without him encrusting the whole bloody thing with mother-of-pearl and those other wotnots.”
“Cabochons.”
“Cabochons, thank you, so don’t let him tell you different, Bubbs. They’re works of art he churns out.”
But Bubbles wasn’t interested in Hardcastle’s technical aptitude. Rich bankers are dandy when it comes to footing bills at the likes of Chanel or Van Cleef & Arpels, but the trouble is, they will spend so much time at the bank. Having given one beau the old heave-ho tonight, she was looking to plug the vacancy fast.
“Why ‘Squiffy’, darling?”
With a glass of champagne permanently welded to one hand, even Biff could work out how she’d acquired her nickname.
“Not what you think, Bubbles,” Foxy laughed. “It’s from the way Teddy wore his cap at school, and damme if he don’t still wear his hat at that angle.”
On anyone else, Fizzy thought, it would come over rakish. On Teddy Hardcastle, the pitched brim lent a certain equanimity and she quietly damned ski-slope noses to eternal hellfire and sent lopsided smiles down the piste after them.
“ – so this exhibition tomorrow,” Orville said. “Is everyone going?”
“Are frogs waterproof?” Foxy Fairfax retorted.
And as though a light had been switched on, the whole group became animated about Chilton Westlake’s new prodigy.
“What’s the verdict on this, then?” Kitty asked, unrolling one of the posters she’d designed to publicise the exhibition at their friend’s gallery. “Have I captured The Great Man, do you think?”
When Doc Frankenstein shot the first electrical bolt through his monster, it couldn’t have made so much of a jolt.
“By Jove, Kitty.” Biff was the first of the group to recover. “You’ve got the blighter off to a tee.”
And how, Fizzy thought. Lank black hair, olive skin, stubbled chin, the slight sneer to his lips . . . dammit, this WAS Louis Boucard.
“Just as well one can’t get scent off a poster,” Biff added, wrinkling his prop forward’s nose.
“He’s French, darling!” Bubbles protested. “And an artiste, to boot. Parisians don’t think the way we do.”
What she meant, Fizzy reflected, was that soap and Louis Boucard were strangers, whereas booze and cocaine were blood brothers. She considered all the other attributes of this artistic genius – his gambling, his womanizing, his debauching of young girls – and wondered exactly how well Kitty Gardener had known Louis Boucard to be able to produce such an intimate representation.
Indeed, how well every other member of the Set had known him, to recognise what they were seeing . . .
“Can’t stand the fellow, as y’know, but I do feel his work has an affinity with Chevaillier,” Catspaw Gordon remarked, emerging from his doldrums at last.
The Boucard effect, of course, Fizzy mused. The uncombed Parisian touched a nerve with everyone sooner or later, and her thoughts flashed back to that portrait in its gilt frame . . .
“ – pronounced Symbolist influence, certainly,” Marriott was saying, “with a touch of the new Classicism overlaid with subtle early Cubist House elements and, hmm, maybe the merest smidgen of the draughtsmanship one sees in Migliorini—”
“Tosh!” Foxy Fairfax interjected. ‘Boucard’s a bounder and a cad who corrupts everything he touches! He’s a liar, a con-man, a thief and a cheat, and by his own admission, he trawls the gutters to paint –” he adopted an exaggerated French whine “ – prozzitutes et felons.”
“Yes, darling, but there’s something so utterly exciting about the demi-monde, don’t you think?” Bubbles shuddered delightedly. “I mean, all that naked flesh and loucheness? I find his work riveting. How about you, Squiffy?’
But before Teddy Hardcastle had a chance to venture his opinion on this blight on the moral and artistic landscape, Chilton Westlake, the gallery owner whose name the Set had adopted for their Friday night get-togethers, arrived wearing a mustard check suit, straw boater and a face like absolute thunder. He was also alone.
“Have you seen these?” His chubby fist pounded the newspapers in his hand. “Have you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “The Westlake Gallery is holding an exhibition of exciting new Parisian artist, Louis Boucard,” he read.
“Sounds just about top-hole to me,” Orville exclaimed. “You wanted a plug for the old show.”
“Plug? PLUG?”
Chilton was in danger of testing medical science’s latest advances in cardiac technology.
“I was supposed to be one doing the plugging here, matey. Instead, what happens? Boucard only gives me some cock-and-bull story about needing to borrow the key to the gallery to make a couple of last minute alterations, don’t he?”
“Inviting the press for a sneak preview instead, I suppose?’
Trust Gloria to get there before anybody else.
“Boucard’s bold style pushes the boundaries of art deco to a new dimension, says the London Bulletin.”
Chilton tossed the paper on the floor and ground it with his spatted heel.
“A greater whiff of decadence than a hundred Tamara de Lempickas, according to the Evening ruddy Witness, and I wouldn’t have minded him stealing a march on my show,” he said, gulping down Marriott’s martini. “But get this.”
He hurled the paper at Foxy, who read aloud.
“ – Boucard has promised a work entitled ‘Revelation’ in addition to the paintings listed in the catalogue. A portrait, the likes of which, he claims, has never before been on public display in this country – a portrait so daring, so scandalous that he’s keeping it under velvet until the official opening. Even the gallery owner . . . Oh, I say, Chilton, is that right?” Foxy goggled. “That even you have no idea of this picture’s content?”
Westlake glugged down Kitty’s drink and even managed to prise Bubble’s bubbles out her grasp.
“Couldn’t be righter, old man. First I knew about this so-called ‘Revelation’ was when I read about it in the bloody papers.”
His little fat hand lashed out to tip Catspaw’s, Biff’s and Teddy’s drinks down the hatch, his expression brightening only slightly when he noticed a stupendous pair of knees crossed elegantly on the soft leather banquette.
“But the really galling thing,” he wailed, “was that Boucard had the cheek to tap me for the fare back to the gallery, and that’s not the first time he’s tapped for a tenner, either!”
Fizzy’s martini was the last remaining casualty and Chilton Westlake was in no mood for taking prisoners.
“I’ll kill the little bashtard,” he said, his boater rolling under the table as he slid down the table. “Sho help me, I’ll shlit his dirty French throat and then I’ll pull his bloody gizzards through the hole.”
At that stage, of course, no-one actually believed him.
3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and the Westlake Gallery resembled more tin of sardines than a preview of an exhibition by a hitherto unknown artis
t. No invitation had been refused, placing something of a strain on the nosebags and drink trays, since Chilton invariably considered himself lucky if one third of his invites turned up to these dos, most often only a quarter (and those usually only relatives and friends). Today the place was packed to the gunwales and, despite bloodshot eyes and an aversion to bright lights, he wasn’t looking half as bad as Fizzy expected. That, she supposed, was because the gallery stood to make a mint from the sensational publicity and give Boucard his due. The Frenchman knew how to play the press.
“Not drinking, sweetheart? Splendid!” Kitty swapped her empty glass for Fizzy’s full one. “Stuffs in perilously short supply. Well, chin-chin.”
Straightening his purple bow tie, Chilton Westlake mounted the podium and launched into a speech about his exciting new protegé and Fizzy noted the care he took to plug the other artists he’d sponsored, clearly intent on shifting as much stock as possible today. Sadly, though, her little plump friend was better at evaluating works of art than talking about them and her attention wandered in the direction of certain portait in a gilt frame. Entitled “Woman in a Mask”, it was typical of Boucard’s style in that –
“I’m not convinced Bubbles finds the demi-monde half as riveting as she’d supposed,” a wry baritone murmured in Fizzy’s cloche-covered ear.
She followed Teddy’s gaze to where the banker’s wife was sandwiched between a brace of hard-eyed villains and a group of women in red heels and even redder lips. In another surprise for Chilton, Boucard had mischievously invited several of his “prozzitutes et felons”, who were swigging champagne and helping themselves to cigars on an industrial scale. Bubbles’s high colour showed she was finding it hard to reconcile the fact that, any minute, she’d be seeing these same people sprawled naked across the gallery walls.
Chilton cleared his throat.
“ – I now call upon Louis to join us and declare this exhibition open!”
Nothing.
“I said,” he repeated, raising his voice, “that I now call upon Louis Boucard to come out from the back room and open the exhibition held in his honour.”
Knowing glances rippled round the crowd, as well as one or two giggles. Drink, drugs, you name it, only a relentless optimist like Chilton could seriously have expected the artist to be sober during the daytime. Louis Boucard was a creature of the night. In every respect.
“Haw, haw.” Chilton tried to cover the gaffe with humour. “Not sure I’ll ever understand you temperamental artistes—”
Bubbles seized the opportunity to detach herself from her underworld sandwich to fetch him, but she wasn’t alone for very long. The shrill scream and the accompanying crash of crystal said it all.
Louis Boucard was dead.
“And you are, miss?’
“Phyllis Potter, 62 Northwell Mansions, Bayswater.” Fizzy’s smile was directed straight at the constable, but her glance was slanted at the man standing beside her. “Right between the museum and a gentleman’s club, if you must know.”
“Thank you, miss. And you, sir?”
“Edward James Hardcastle, 17b Elton Square, Chelsea.” He kept his eyes straight. “Too many stuffed shirts and old fossils for my taste.”
“Oh, dear. Elderly residents are they, sir?”
“Not exactly, constable. Is that all?”
“For the moment, yes, thank you. But we’re asking people not to venture far from the scene, as there will doubtless be other questions we wish to ask. In fact, I understand there’s a bar down the road—”
“Jo-Jo’s,” Fizzy said. “We know it well, constable. Regular watering hole,” she added, tossing her boa over her shoulder, but instead of following Kitty and Marriott out into the afternoon sunshine, she took advantage of the milling confusion to slip into the anteroom.
Ugh. Louis Boucard wasn’t what one would call classically handsome in life. Grey and waxy in death, he was even more unprepossessing! She took care not to tread in the broken glass from Bubbles’s champagne as she approached the desk where he was slumped. Someone, it appeared, had caved the prodigy’s head in with a rather sleek black marble panther. The bloodied statuette lay on the desk among enough cocaine – she tasted the powder with a tentative finger – yes, with enough cocaine to supply a small continent for a decade, possibly two.
So then. Not content to take it himself. Louis had been pushing the stuff.
“You realize he was dead before he was beaned?”
Fizzy yelped, half of her livid that she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the wall with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. While the other half was too busy picturing her hatful of kids made in this man’s wretched image . . .
“If you’re telling me someone frightened him to death,” she said coolly, “I’m not remotely surprised.”
A muscle twitched at the side of Teddy Hardcastle’s mouth. “Boucard, I fear, was more tormenter than tormented.”
He feared right. Louis could be facing an army of flesh-eating zombies and he’d con them back to the grave.
“Look.”
Teddy lifted a hank of dark hair to reveal a puncture wound in Boucard’s dirty neck.
“The ice pick or whatever severed his spinal cord, paralyzing all muscular activity. The lungs stopped functioning, so did the heart, but death, as always I’m afraid, comes slowly.”
Fizzy reeled and was immediately caught in a steel net that smelled of ski slopes and pine.
“Never fear, Phyllis Potter of 62 Northwell Drive, Bayswater. Looks like he was unconscious when it happened.”
Fizzy disentangled herself from his arms, slightly surprised that bookbinders had so many muscles.
“Why aren’t the police swarming all over this room?” she asked.
“Ah, well. It would appear our boys in blue haven’t realized that there would be more blood, had Louis been alive when he was brained, and knowing the blunt instrument to be a favourite among the criminal underclass, they rather fancy one of those as the culprit.”
Solicitously, Teddy straightened her hat. Fizzy jerked away, hoping he couldn’t see the furious blush that had suffused her cheeks.
“What guff,” she snapped. “Those girls aren’t on the game because they enjoy it. They’re dishing out knee-tremblers because they’ve run out of options, and even if one of them had killed Louis Boucard, they’d never leave a fortune in cocaine lying around.”
Not when it would buy them their freedom – and no self-respecting thief would dream of walking away empty-handed, no matter how pushed they had been to commit murder!
“Precisely the argument I presented to His Majesty’s law enforcers,” he began, but whatever else he was going to say was overtaken by the door bursting open and Chilton, Orville, Gloria and a uniformed inspector rushing into the room.
“This is an outrage,” Chilton was blustering. “An absolute bloody outrage! Why should I want to kill him?”
“You have a persuasive line in arguments, Mr Hardcastle,” Fizzy muttered under her breath. “You got them to abandon the criminal underclass, so they’re pinching Chilton’s collar instead.”
The inspector shot her a venomous glance and continued.
“You were overheard threatening the deceased in the Pink Parrot nightclub last night,” he told Chilton, leaving the assembled company in no doubt as to his opinion of such a den of tangoed iniquity. “Lewis Buckard had given the press an unauthorized showing—”
“For heaven’s sake, man, it’s Louis,” Chilton protested, “pronounced Boo-car.”
“ – and he’d also been holding out on you with regard to a mysterious portrait. To wit, this.”
He indicated the easel in the corner draped in black velvet.
“Inspector,” Orville cut in, “I have explained how Mr Westlake was in plain view of everyone at all times this afternoon. I don’t see how you can possibly follow this ridiculous line of questioning.”
In true political style, the Hon. Member then rephrased his argument in
fifteen different ways. Somewhere between the fourth and the fifth, Gloria came across and took both Fizzy’s hands in hers.
“Are you all right, darling? You look terribly pale.”
“Yes, I’m fine, really I am. Just a shock, that’s all, seeing death at close quarters.”
She glanced at Teddy Hardcastle, who had seen more of it and at far closer quarters, then looked back into Gloria’s permanently sad eyes.
They’d been laughing, that was the terrible part. Celebrating because Fizzy had landed her first job with À la Mode and Gloria had just received confirmation that baby number two, already well advanced, was healthy and ready to hatch out on schedule. Yes, they’d been laughing fit to burst when that telegram came . . .
Fizzy shivered. “The police don’t really suspect Chilton, do they?”
“Darling, if they had a man standing over the body waving a placard written in Louis’s own blood which read ‘It was me’, they’d still think the butler did it.”
Gloria glanced at her husband, boring the inspector into submission.
“Orville will set them right,” she assured her.
Shouldn’t be hard, either, Fizzy supposed. To compensate for his physical shortcomings, Chilton upholstered himself in the loudest checks he could find. Top that with a purple bow tie and spats, and who could miss him?’
“For goodness sake,” Chilton snorted. “I’m hardly likely to kill the goose that lays my golden eggs, am I, you clod?”
The inspector, who wasn’t entirely won over by being labelled a clod, didn’t take to having his chest prodded, either.
“You’re wasting time,” Chilton snapped, “and anyway, what about the theft of my picture, eh? Eh? Why aren’t you investigating that?”
“What picture?” Fizzy asked Gloria.
Patrician eyes rolled. “Wouldn’t you just know that while this kerfuffle’s been going on, someone would filch one of the exhibits? Of course, it’ll be worth a fortune on the black market after today. Chilton’s incandescent.”
“Nonsense,” Fizzy murmured. “He probably snitched it himself, to drive up the price of the others.”
“So true, darling. No artist is ever worth so much as when he dies.”
