An Expert in Murder

by Nicola Upson

  ‘What an odd place to have a shop,’ said Josephine, voicing his own thoughts exactly. ‘I suppose I should have expected that, having seen a sample of the Lillibet lines. They could never be described as conventional.’ Certainly, number twenty-six had been imaginatively if improbably transformed from its unpromising beginnings as a red-brick terraced house, moderate in size and much like the ones that stood either side. The upper storey had managed to maintain an air of residential normality, but that only served to accentuate the enthusiastic attempts to turn the lower living quarters into a temple of fashion. If you knew where to look, London was actually full of little shops known to a special clientele and run by women who designed and made their own wares. Even so, Josephine could not imagine that there was another boutique quite like this anywhere in the city. The lack of passing trade had not deterred its proprietor from making the same efforts with her window-dressing that characterised the more fortunately placed outlets in Kensington and Regent Street. The harmonies of light and colour, the daringly original ideas were bountifully evident and, if her waxen smile was to be trusted, the figure in the window who beckoned the doubtful to step inside 84

  seemed to bear no resentment at being asked to market her goods away from the mainstream. The standard wooden front door which was repeated up and down Verbena Gardens had been replaced here by a glass frontage, onto which the name was elaborately painted in gold. But today the closed sign deterred any prospective shoppers and the blinds at the door, still firmly pulled down, contrasted poignantly with the evening frocks and picture hats that spoke of such gaiety on either side.

  With a sigh, Penrose stopped outside and, as a discreet card in the window invited him to do, rang for attention. For a minute or two, the bell brought no response then, as he was about to try again, a light came on at the back of the shop and someone shot the bolts back on the door. When it opened, the wretched night that Frank Simmons had spent was written on his face and in the creases of the clothes which he had worn the previous evening.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re a little late, Mr Simmons,’ Penrose said. ‘We were held up by the Boat Race crowds.’

  Simmons looked blankly past him, and Penrose wondered if he expected to see people suddenly thronging into Verbena Gardens.

  ‘The Boat Race? Ah yes, it’s today isn’t it? Cambridge are favourites, I believe, but they say that both crews are strong this year.’ He paused, still looking off down the road. ‘Normally we’d have gone down to have a look but we just haven’t had time today.

  There seems so much to do, what with Betty having to go up to Berwick to fetch Alice down. You did say that would be all right, Inspector? She’s too upset to travel on her own, and Betty’s so good with her. They’ve always got on well.’

  ‘That’s fine, Mr Simmons,’ said Penrose gently. ‘It’s important that she has someone with her at a time like this. But we’d just like to have a chat with the two of you first. May we come inside for a bit?’

  ‘Of course. How stupid of me. Please, come in,’ he said and led them into the shop, past the overnight bag which stood packed and waiting by the door and into a tidy, unexpectedly spacious sales area. As they moved towards the back of the shop, where a red velvet curtain was pulled to one side to reveal stairs to the liv-85

  ing quarters above, Penrose made the formal introductions. ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss, Mr Simmons,’ said Josephine, and her words carried such genuine warmth and regret that Simmons relaxed immediately, forgetting for a moment the presence of an inspector of Scotland Yard. ‘Elspeth was a lovely girl,’ she continued, ‘and I’m only sorry not to have known her better. We talked a great deal on our way down here, though, and she was very excited about her visit. She obviously enjoyed her time in London with you.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what a comfort that is, Miss Tey,’ Simmons replied. ‘We had some happy times together at that theatre, Elspeth and me, and many of them were thanks to you. It will have meant a lot to her to have met you at last – she always wanted to.

  Alice – that’s my sister-in-law, Elspeth’s mother – she’s not so keen on plays as we are, but she asked me to thank you for your kindness. There’s not much that can console her at the moment, but when I told her what the Inspector said about you making friends with Elspeth so quickly, that helped a bit, I think.’

  At the top of the stairs they were met by a small, birdlike woman, dressed immaculately in a sober but well-cut suit.

  Comparing her with her husband, Josephine would have considered her to be in her early forties but she had that sort of face which had never been truly young and which had probably changed very little over the years. Never in all her life could she remember seeing anyone quite as neat as Betty Simmons: her clothes, her dark auburn hair, the way she stood were all judged with a careful precision that was reflected in her manner of speech; not a word was out of place in those frugal sentences of welcome.

  How Elspeth’s exuberance had fitted into this small house with its tidy containment, Josephine could not imagine.

  She could, however, envisage the pleasure that the girl would have found in the eccentric streak which drove Frank Simmons to acquire every bit of theatrical memorabilia he could lay his hands on. When Elspeth had spoken about the collection on the train, Josephine had imagined it to consist of nothing but pile after pile of theatre programmes and magazines gathering dust in a corner. On 86

  the contrary, what drew her attention almost as soon as she entered the Simmonses’ sitting room was a vibrant pocket of history which told the story of the stage for the last fifty years or more. All along one wall of the room, in a series of glass-fronted cases originally designed to protect precious books, hundreds of small objects were proudly displayed. While Betty disappeared into a tiny kitchen to make tea, Josephine took advantage of a pause in the formalities to look at them more closely. Each was carefully labelled like an exhibit in a museum, and certainly as valuable to anyone with a passion for theatre: the items were laid out chronologically, beginning with a property book used by Ellen Terry as Portia in 1875

  and, next to it, a pair of the invisible spectacles which her leading man, Henry Irving, had worn. On the wall in between the first two cases, the mirror from Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s dressing room reflected a wax figurine of Edith Evans as Millamant in The Way of the World, but so evocative was the setting that the glass still seemed to hold echoes of the extraordinary character make-up that Beerbohm Tree had created for the likes of Fagin and Falstaff. The new stars of the stage were well represented, too; next to a 1925

  edition of The Sketch, which showed Noël Coward on the cover breakfasting in bed, there was a flask in the form of a book, one of several which the playwright had given to the cast of his operetta, Bitter Sweet, on its opening night.

  It really was an extraordinary display and, in spite of the som-bre nature of the afternoon, Josephine and Archie could not help but be fascinated. Simmons, gratified by their interest and pleased to grasp at any distraction from the real world, joined them by the cases and showed them the intricate workings of a silver plate cruet in the shape of Grimaldi which came to pieces to reveal salt and pepper pots in his pantaloons and a glass bottle for dressing in his chest; as the goose-heads appearing from his pockets were revealed to be the handles of spoons, Archie momentarily forgot his profession and exclaimed in delight. ‘This must have taken you years to build up,’ he said. ‘Where on earth did you get it all from?’

  ‘It’s a labour of love, Sir,’ Simmons replied. ‘I’ve been lucky in that an old pal of mine got a stage door job when he came out of 87

  the army, and he always keeps his eyes open for me. You’d be amazed at what people chuck away – some of this stuff didn’t cost me a penny. And when people start to know you collect something, they get in touch with you if they’ve got something of interest. Come and look at this – it’s too big to keep in here.’

  Penrose followed Elspeth’s uncle into another room to view the pri
de and joy of his collection – the drum which Irving had used to create the sound of many a battle at the Lyceum. Josephine, who had never had the remotest inclination to open herself up to strangers, nevertheless admired the natural way in which Archie found a common ground with everyone.

  ‘I still can’t believe she’s dead,’ said Betty Simmons, returning with the tea tray and pouring four neat cups without spilling a drop. ‘She just wasn’t the sort of girl that things happen to. When she was little, she’d make up stories about herself. Alice used to say it was because she was adopted – there was always something that she couldn’t know, so she invented it differently every day.

  They wondered if they’d done the right thing in telling her, but you can’t keep that sort of thing secret forever, can you? The shock of finding it out later might have destroyed her, and it wasn’t as if she was unhappy with Alice and Walter. She was such a sweet girl to them, so kind and thoughtful. But not knowing who she really came from made her curious about everything.’

  ‘When was she adopted, Mrs Simmons?’ asked Penrose, as he came back into the room and sat down.

  ‘It was just before the war ended. Walter had come back in a dreadful state – not physically, you understand, but it had done terrible things to his mind – and Alice was trying to hold everything together for both of them, working all hours of the day and looking after him as well. We did as much as we could, but they were so far away up there. Alice didn’t want to come down to London because all her family were in Berwick and that’s where the business was. We thought she was mad at the time to take on a baby as well, but we were wrong. It was what she’d always wanted and she coped beautifully.’

  ‘So it was the Berwick authorities that handled the adoption?’

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  The Simmonses looked at each other doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t exactly done through the proper channels, you see,’ said Frank after a pause. ‘Walter arranged it privately when he was in the army. Someone he served with had a child he couldn’t bring up himself – I don’t know why – but it seemed like the answer to all Walter’s prayers. He and Alice couldn’t have any of their own, you see, and being without kids was eating up Alice with grief; she made herself quite ill with it at one stage, and Walter was in despair. They were so in love when they first married; I’ve never seen a man so happy. He would have done anything for her, and a baby was what she wanted most in all the world. When Elspeth came along, it seemed too good to be true. She couldn’t have been more loved if she had been their own.’

  ‘It changed them, though,’ his wife added. ‘The end of the war and Elspeth’s arrival all happened at the same time, so somehow she seemed to get caught up in what the fighting had done to him.

  He was never the same towards Alice when he came back; she said so herself. But the baby transformed her life. Elspeth was the making of Alice, but sometimes I think she destroyed Walter. They might have got through it if it had been just the two of them.’

  ‘Betty! You can’t say that about an innocent little baby.’

  ‘It’s true though, Frank, and it’s nobody’s fault. Don’t get me wrong,’ she continued, turning back to Josephine and Archie. ‘I don’t mean that Walter didn’t love Elspeth. Of course he did. It wasn’t that he resented her or that Alice neglected him. It was just that having a child gave Alice an excuse to put all her emotional energy into the little one. She looked after Walter, but she stopped trying to understand him.’

  ‘It’s hard to care for a man you love but don’t always recognise,’

  said Josephine, who knew all too well what sort of psychological props long-term sickness demanded. When her own mother had died suddenly, she had given up her teaching career to return to Inverness and keep house for her father. Her sisters were married by then, and it had seemed the sensible thing to do. For the first few years, she had been happy back in her home town; her father continued to run the grocery store that he owned in the High 89

  Street and she had enjoyed the peace and familiarity of Crown Cottage. Alone in the house during the day, she had time to write and was pleased when her early attempts to be published in various journals and magazines were moderately successful. In time, her poems and short stories led to full-length novels, but what began as pure pleasure soon became an essential facet of her own well-being: when her father’s health began to suffer, companionship turned to dependence and she found that she desperately needed another place to lay the emotions which she no longer dare attach to him for fear of how strongly she would feel his death when it eventually came. It took a rare amount of strength to care for someone who was lost to you without putting up those barriers of self-protection, and she refused to judge Alice Simmons harshly for failing to find it. ‘I’m sure Elspeth must have felt the weight of that responsibility, too, as she grew older,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ Frank agreed, ‘although I think it hit her hardest when Walter died and she had to take care of her mother. She was aware of the change in Alice, you see, because she’d always been so capable; she never knew Walter when he was truly himself. It wasn’t all bad. There were times when he tried to pull himself together and be what he’d been before, but it never lasted long.’

  Simmons paused, looking down at his hands. ‘Were you over there, Inspector?’ Archie nodded and let him continue. ‘After a while, you forget how senseless it all seemed at the time. The more the years went by, the more Walter looked back to the war as the time when he meant something, when people respected him. He thought it would be a new start, coming home to a wife he loved with a child of their own to bring up, but it never worked out that way for him. I kept telling him – it’s not the war years that were right, it’s the peace years that are wrong, but he never would accept that. None of us really found the land fit for heroes that we were promised but you adjust, don’t you? He couldn’t.’

  ‘Did he keep in touch with any of his army friends?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I remember him telling me once about a reunion they were having. He couldn’t afford to go but some of them clubbed together and paid for his ticket. Even then, he hated 90

  every minute of it because he didn’t think his clothes were good enough. It’s no wonder he was bitter, is it? He went off with crowds throwing flowers at him, and when he came back he couldn’t even enjoy a drink with the men he’d fought alongside because he was ashamed of the coat on his back.’

  Penrose listened, remembering some of the uncomfortable reunions he had been to himself. At times it had felt much easier to drink to the tragedy of the dead than to look the living in the eye, knowing that many of those men came back to the realisation that the world they had fought so hard for no longer wanted them.

  ‘Did anyone ever make contact with Elspeth’s real parents?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure Alice even knew who they were, and Elspeth certainly didn’t. It was almost as if keeping in touch with them would have been tempting fate: they might have changed their minds and wanted her back.’

  ‘But Alice did once mention something that she asked me not to tell anyone.’ All eyes turned to Betty Simmons, and her husband looked at her questioningly. ‘Every year, on Elspeth’s birthday, Walter got a letter with some money in it. The letter was never signed and Walter wouldn’t tell her who it was from, although he always denied it was from her parents. One year, when Walter was particularly ill, Alice got to the envelope first and opened it. There were ten five-pound notes inside, and a letter that just said, “You know where I am if you change your mind.” Walter was furious when he found out she’d opened it, but he refused to explain what it meant; he just told Alice not to worry, that if she wanted Elspeth to be happy she should forget all about it. That’s why she begged me not to say anything,’ she added by way of explanation to Frank. ‘She was terrified she might lose the child.’

  Penrose was quiet for a moment as he considered the implications of Betty Simmons’s secret. The most obvious explanat
ion for the money was that it had been sent by Elspeth’s real parents to help with the cost of bringing her up, but the message in the note made a nonsense of that: surely if they had wanted her back they could have just taken her, particularly as there was no legal agree-91

  ment to protect Walter and Alice. ‘You’re sure the letter said “I”

  and not “we”?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, at least I’m sure that’s what she told me it said,’ Betty replied with certainty. ‘I remember wondering if one of her parents hadn’t really wanted to give her up and was trying to get her back, but I didn’t say that to Alice. It would have only worried her even more.’

  The same thought had occurred to Penrose, who was developing a growing respect for Mrs Simmons’s intelligence. Josephine took advantage of the pause in his questioning. ‘When we were having lunch on the train,’ she began, ‘Elspeth seemed very excited about a young man she’d met quite recently. Do you know who he is?’

  ‘You must mean Hedley,’ said Frank. ‘Hedley White. He works backstage at Wyndham’s and the New. They met a couple of months ago when Elspeth and I were queuing for an autograph.

  He took her programme to get it signed, and when he came back with it he asked her if she’d like to have tea with him. After that, he took her out whenever she was down here. He’s a nice lad, and Elspeth was smitten. Nobody had ever shown much interest in her in that way before, and he always seemed to treat her well. Betty and I never worried when she was out with him.’

  ‘She was seeing him tonight, wasn’t she?’ Josephine asked.

  ‘Yes, they were going to the theatre together. He’d got top-price seats as a treat because he knew how much she loved your play.