Unluckily, she herself had no creative talent worth talking of. She had a good head for business combined with an intuitive grasp of what the market wanted. In other words, she understood fashion as interpreter. She needed someone like Gabriel and meant to hang on to her if she could. Usually she was content to let her young designers drift away; few of them were heard of again. Perhaps contact with Rose Hilaire had sucked them dry. But in the case of Gabriel she could foresee a long and profitable relationship, if not a particularly happy one. If Gabriel examined the small print of her contract she could see that Rose had allowed herself a ten-year option on her services.
Now she said: ‘I don’t trust her, Dagmar, but thanks all the same.’
Dagmar Blond buttoned her coat. ‘How long have we known each other?’
Rose did not answer because she knew from experience that Dagmar was about to tell her.
‘I worked for your aunt when she was running the business, and I was with your grandfather before that, God rest his soul.’
Grandfather Hilaire’s soul received frequent benedictions from Dagmar Blond who found him a useful seal of approval, although in life she had been no more than an errand girl in his workshop whose face he barely knew. Still, it proved she went a long way back with Rose.
‘So we inherited each other.’ Rose remained good-humoured. ‘And if I remember right, Gabriel came with an introduction from you.’
‘All right, all right. She came from Paradise Street. That ought to have told you something.’
Paradise Street was a short, crowded street running between Mouncy Street and Rowley Road, near the railway station and hard by the factory. It was famous for the close-knit family groups which lived there. Famous also for living by their own rules, and being well known to the police.
‘So did we once,’ said Rose Hilaire, ‘and we’ve moved away. That girl will be going a long way from Paradise Street.’
But they both knew you never got Paradise Street out of your system, it was there for always, something you were born to, like a crown or an inherited disease.
It said something about you when you said you came from Paradise Street. It had a past and a history, had Paradise Street, and they both projected themselves into the future. Strange violent things had happened there and were suppressed by the inhabitants: it was their business, other people could only guess.
‘I can manage her,’ Rose repeated.
‘And what about Joe?’
‘Joe?’
‘Yes. Joseph Benedict Landau,’ said Dagmar. ‘Can you manage him?’
‘Leave Joe out of it.’ Rose did not like to hear Dagmar talk about Joe; he was private.
She and Gabriel represented opposing poles in fashion but Rose was old enough to know that in the end they might complement each other. Even in looks they were different: Gabriel, beside being still very young, was slight, small-boned like a bird, and with dark eyes and a flow of dark hair, which at the moment, she ironed straight every morning. To those who said she might be bald at forty as a consequence she said either that she did not expect to live that long or else that she would buy a wig. Already she owned two falls of hair which she wore on an Alice band. Rose was tall, full of bust and narrow of waist, with a round face and strong curly blonde hair. Like Gabriel, she had a wardrobe of wigs. On her they never looked quite natural.
She looked at the clock on her desk, a round black face set in a crystal block, one of her first presents to herself when she began to make money. The factory was closing down, emptying for the night, but she often worked late, telephoning round her branches or to various contacts in the fashion trade. It was her time for keeping in touch with movements in her world.
But she also liked to be home to greet Steve when he came in from school. He came as near as he ever did to talking to her then. Anyway, it was the time that messages passed back and forth between them.
Because she wanted to stay in the neighbourhood from which she sprang, a desire reinforced by her wish to give a strong background to Steve, she had moved to a flat in a new block overlooking the river not far from Mouncy Street. She could walk there in ten minutes, but she drove in her Porsche. She was a slow and cautious driver, causing both alarm and irritation to other drivers by her handling of her fast car.
She wanted to get home but she also had several business matters she needed to check up on, not least of which was the possible destination of the portfolio of designs she imagined that Gabriel was creating. You couldn’t keep that sort of thing secret in the relatively tight world they lived in. Only as youthful an operator as Gabriel would have expected to.
On looking the field over, it seemed to Rose that there were two candidates: on the one hand there was the old-established firm of Senlis Styles which was seeking (and rightly so in Rose’s opinion) to change its image. On the other hand there was the small and thrusting new firm of Lizzie Dreamer whose super-active boss, a stout young man called Touch, was busy scooping up all the new talent available.
Rose herself had had a brush or two with Teddy Touch and almost wished Gabriel joy of him, but this was a weakness she could not allow herself. You hung on to what you had and you never let go, that was her style.
Then the telephone rang on her desk, not the red one that was entirely office and work, but the blue one which was her private number. Only family and friends used it.
‘Hello. Is that you?’
A young, gruff voice, she knew it at once, even though it was so rarely used for her.
‘Steve, what is it? Why are you calling?’
‘Well …’ A hesitation, a fumbling for words. Was it that he could not speak, or would not? ‘Just to say – that something bad has happened.’
‘Steve … Please … What is it?’ She was almost shouting.
The telephone was removed from his hand, and another voice spoke. A woman’s voice, educated, gentle but with a hint of command and a slight Scottish accent. ‘Miss Fraser speaking …’ Steve’s headmistress at Hook Road School.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Can you come round, Mrs Hilaire? At once? I think it would be best. There is something you have to be told.’
It seemed to Rose Hilaire that she could hear other voices in the background. Another woman and perhaps a man.
Yes, certainly a man, and why not, in a school? But all the same she didn’t like the sound of it at all.
Before she left, she picked up her blue phone. ‘Joe? I’m sorry, darling. Tonight’s not on. Trouble here.’ Hook Road School had lately undergone a face-lift. As cosmetic surgery, it was minor and superficial, designed as is usually the case with such surgery to raise the spirits rather than change the character. Old woodwork had been replaced with newer structures, strip lighting had taken the place of glass globes hanging from the ceiling. Pale turquoise paint had replaced the steady old green paint of the old days. A new heating system boosted the temperature so that some rooms were uncomfortably warm, though the lavatories and washrooms for both staff and children were as chilly and damp as ever. Within the next decade the buildings were due to be demolished to give place to a glittering new place of stone and glass. The staff had seen pictures of it and were profoundly uneasy.
But for the moment Hook Road School was much as it had been when the Victorian School Board of Governors devised its architecture and meant it to last. As indeed it had done, through two world wars, Zeppelin raids and the Blitz. The ghosts of the old pupils (who still seemed to hang about in the smells and noises) would have felt quite at home.
There was a piano being played somewhere in the building; there had always been a piano being played.
Miss Fraser shut the door against the noise. She was young for a headmistress, and as tough as her job demanded, which was tough enough. She gave the impression of having an active and vital life outside school. Otherwise she was fond of children and good-humoured. But today she looked tense and preoccupied, as if underneath she was frightened.
In the ro
om with her was a bearded man, sitting down, a uniformed policewoman, standing up, and Steve Hilaire who was half sitting, half crouched on a hard chair, beside him his sports bag.
‘Come in, Mrs Hilaire.’ Miss Fraser took her hand away from the door, and momentarily leaned against it as if she could do with its support. ‘Let me get you a chair. Steve, get one for your mother.’
Silently Steve got off his chair for his mother to sit down. Their eyes met and passed each other without comment. Rose’s gaze slid on and settled on the policewoman.
‘What’s this? Why is she here?’ Rose, when frightened, was always aggressive.
The policewoman looked at Miss Fraser, who gave a slight nod. They settled it between them that Miss Fraser would do the talking. At first.
Rose’s eyes flicked nervously to Steve. ‘What’s it about, then? Why am I here? What’s it to do with Steve?’
She couldn’t stop her eyes going back to that bag of his.
‘This afternoon,’ began Lovella Fraser, ‘the school had its uniform inspection, there’s always one once a term. Just a check-up to see that everyone has the right shoes, and blazer and so on. Sports equipment, that sort of thing. Every child lays out his stuff, and we do it form by form.’ She nodded towards the bearded man. ‘Mr Gordon is Steve’s form-master.’
‘So what’s the mystery?’ Rose was getting her nerve back. ‘Steve – you haven’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to you?’ At times of pressure the old Paradise Street slipped out; petty theft had been an occupation there, and accusations of it a commonplace of life.
‘No, we don’t think he’s taken anything.’
‘Come on then. Why am I here?’
Miss Fraser cleared her throat, she was still to do the talking. ‘I don’t know if you have heard about Ephraim Humphreys?’
Rose stared at her, she appeared to be searching her memory. ‘I don’t know.’ She frowned, temporarily off balance. ‘Ephraim Humphreys … ? He’s a boy, a little boy?’
The policewoman made an involuntary move. Young, yes, still a boy, aged twelve. But not so little. Tall for his age. Above average. Steve was tall also, although his choirboy-like innocent face sometimes made you forget this.
‘I don’t read the papers much,’ Rose stumbled on.
Miss Fraser accepted the tacit admission that Rose knew more than she seemed capable of getting out. ‘Yes. It has been in the newspapers.’
‘He’s gone away?’ Her gaze fell upon Steve’s sports bag, her Christmas present to him and now on the headmistress’s desk. Open.
The woman detective thought: Gone away was one way of putting it. Two weeks ago a twelve-year-old boy called Ephraim Humphreys, a pupil at Hook Road School, left his family home after a sparse breakfast in good time to do his paper round and then get to school … The woman detective shifted her stance from one foot to another.
‘No one knows if he ever got here, his papers were delivered but no one noticed if he arrived at school or not.’
‘I’m remembering,’ said Rose. It had all happened at a time when she was busier than usual getting together the winter collection of clothes. They made four collections a year, as did most wholesalers (and in spite of her chain of shops, that was how she regarded herself; she wasn’t a couture house, that was sure). The winter collection, the third for which Gabriel had been responsible, had been a difficult one. Skirts were going up, getting shorter and shorter, but there were hints that daytime overcoats might suddenly lengthen, sweeping the ground. At least one Paris house had shown some such, and one New York. In New York they had, as they say, bombed. But who could say what London would do? London took its own line, it was on its own. Rose had wanted to stay with a safe, half-way line and Gabriel had said that was disaster, you had to be brave and plunge. Literally, let the hemline of heavyweight winter coats drop, go right down to the ground. Team them with short, short skirts and wet-look shiny boots, and you would have a total look. It had been their first big quarrel. Not the last, by any means, but the biggest and the loudest. Gabriel had won.
Into their quarrel the story about the local boy who had gone missing had hardly penetrated, but she found now she could dig out more details than she would have guessed. It was all there, a story waiting to tell itself to her.
The boy had gone out from his home in Decimus Street after eating a bowl of ready-cook porridge and drinking a cup of tea. He had been wearing his usual school clothes, but on his feet his favourite but eccentric red boots. These had been a present from his grandmother in America. He loved them and always wore them when he could. They had a soft canvas top and leather bindings, a kind of house slipper really, and not for outdoors. He would have to change them when he got to school because they were not allowed with the school uniform.
He had not been missed until the late afternoon when his mother came in from work; she thought he might be playing with friends and waited. When her husband arrived they both took alarm. They tried asking friends and neighbours but no one had seen Ephraim. The husband (who was not the boy’s father) went round the streets looking for the boy, the wife stayed at home, waiting in case her son came back. Next day they discovered he had never been at school. But by that time the police already knew and were on the job.
‘Yes, it’s all coming back,’ said Rose. In fact it came back with a quick fast flood that she found painful. She remembered how the mother had looked when she appeared on television appealing about her son, and how untidy her hair had been; she remembered how the owner of the newspaper shop had managed to look both defensive and guilty when he was probably neither. She remembered the woman on the bus who was crying. Where she came in Rose had no idea but she clearly remembered the woman’s tears. ‘You didn’t know him, did you, Steve?’ Not specially know, not as a friend, surely she would have remembered.
‘Yes, Steve did know him. They were in the same form.’ Miss Fraser provided the answer. She looked at Mr Gordon, who spoke for the first time.
‘I don’t believe they were special friends. But I could be wrong.’
‘Well, he didn’t say anything to me.’ But when did he ever say anything to her? Everyone, or almost everyone, had a secret life, but Steve’s sometimes looked like a secret even from him.
‘Inside the bag we found these …’
Jim Gordon unzipped the bag slowly, or it felt slowly to Rose, and took out, first a white sweater, then a light cotton shirt with matching trousers, the boys’ sports outfit, and a crumpled tracksuit. She recognized them all as Steve’s, they had his look somehow, smelt like him.
Then he held the bag out wide and let Rose look in. At the bottom of the bag, dented and crushed, looking as if they had been there undisturbed for some time were a pair of red boots. The red boots.
Rose raised her head from the survey. ‘Ephraim’s?’
She did not look at Steve, but she knew he was staring out of the window with the air of one who had nothing to do with what was going on here.
Now the policewoman came forward. ‘I’m Joan Gilmour, Mrs Hilaire, Sergeant Joan Gilmour. These are the boots the boy was wearing when he disappeared. Or we think they are. We can’t be quite sure without a positive identification from Mrs Humphreys. Or forensic proof. Or perhaps both … But Steve says he doesn’t know anything about them.’
Rose shook her head. ‘Then he doesn’t.’
Gently the other woman said: ‘From the look of it, they have been in his bag some time … He must have seen them every time he went to the bag. But he won’t say … We thought you might talk to him.’
Rose smiled, it was a game smile in the circumstances, but it stretched across her face like a grimace of pain. ‘I don’t believe Steve will talk to me. He doesn’t usually. He might talk to me on the telephone, or he might write me a message, if he had something specific to say. Such as affected his own comfort, you understand …’
‘Mrs Hilaire …’ began Miss Fraser, her voice shocked, but Rose went on:
‘He won’t ta
lk to me. If you want to get someone to talk to Steve then I suggest you try Miss Andrews who teaches English and drama. She likes him.’
‘We all like Steve.’
Rose nodded. Good. So did she, she supposed, and a fat lot of good it did her. No, that wasn’t true: she loved him, but she sometimes found it hard to like him.
‘And Miss Andrews has spoken to Steve: she was there when the boots were found, as it happens.’
‘This is serious, Mrs Hilaire,’ said Sergeant Joan Gilmour. ‘Can you make Steve see how serious and that we can’t accept his story as it stands?’
‘He knows it’s serious, I expect.’ She looked at her son. ‘Well?’
Steve opened his mouth as if to speak.
‘Be careful what you way, Steve,’ said Jim Gordon.
Steve stopped talking even before he had started. Rose knew that phenomenon. It had started out in life with her and she still saw it daily, as if Steve had words ready to pour out to her and bit them back. She had stopped wondering why he did it. In her heart she knew that one day he would tell her and the truth would be hard to bear, better put it off.
A heavy silence settled on the room. Everyone in the room, except Rose, was wondering how to deal with it. The policewoman thought a good hard smack might be the answer, but couldn’t be the one to deliver it. Jim Gordon knew he shouldn’t have spoken and was regretting that he had opened his mouth; he was sunk in his own problem. So too for that matter was Lovella Fraser, who knew she had to control the situation and come out of it well; she knew, all the teachers at Hook Road School knew, that when the great amalgamation of three schools into one big comprehensive took place then the headship of that school would go to the best. She had to be that best. The rivalry among her peers was intense and so was the gossip about who was coping well with what.
Coffin in Fashion Page 2
