Murder a la Mode

by Patricia Moyes

  “It was clear that Knight was also getting Paris pictures ahead of their release dates. Where from? As soon as I saw a picture on his desk of Ronnie on the Eiffel Tower, I knew that it was Style pictures he was getting. Michael Healy had been making his own prints the night before, having sent his assistant home, and he took a briefcase away from the offices with him. It seemed certain that Michael himself was supplying Nicholas with illicit photographs. I decided that he would only do so under pressure, and I remembered certain extremely catty remarks that Nicholas had made to me.

  “In the end, I went straight to Michael and put it to him. He was nearly at the end of his tether, and told me the truth. Once, years ago, he had been mixed up in a nasty scandal with a crowd of notorious homosexuals. Knight knew this, and threatened to denounce him to Goring—not to mention Teresa—unless he supplied the photographs. I persuaded Michael to let me tell Teresa the whole story, which she took very well, and I told him he needn’t worry about Knight any more. I also managed to get this season’s pictures out of Knight’s office for him. I don’t think he’ll have any more worries.”

  “All right,” said Emmy. “My head’s whirring, but I think I’m with you so far. You still haven’t explained why Helen was killed, or who stole the tissue paper…”

  “Nobody stole it,” said Henry. “Its rightful owner collected it.”

  “Riddles again,” said Jane, rather sharply.

  “Once again,” said Henry, “we digress. This time to the Duchess of Basingstoke’s ball gown, which could not, as Knight claimed, have been copied from a photograph. There had been a scandal, and Knight, who is not a stable character, was getting worried. There’s a tragic aspect to all this, too. He says now, and I believe him, that this was the last season that he and Rachel proposed to pirate designs. He was good enough to stand on his own, and today’s show was a triumph. He’s an immensely talented young man, but he wanted his success too fast.”

  “What I still don’t see,” said Donald, “is the connection between him and Rachel Field.”

  “That puzzled me, too,” said Henry, “until I went back over the evidence, and realized that Knight was lying when he said he’d never met her before that night at Goring’s. Everybody confirmed that he didn’t go near her all the evening until he came up to her and Barry, and—as Barry said—‘suggested they should leave and also said he would take Miss Field, as she lived in the same direction.’ So, he knew her, and he knew where she lived, but he denied it. Why? Then I suddenly remembered a tiny moment while I was interviewing him, when I mentioned that I wanted to investigate the relationships between various people, and he nearly fainted with fright. That was when the thought came to me, suddenly, that they must be brother and sister. I sent a man to check at Somerset House, and sure enough, Nicholas Knight changed his name some years ago by deed poll. His real name was Nicolas Field.”

  Henry paused. “I know more about it now,” he said. “I’ve spoken to both of them. They were born to parents living in respectable, white-collar poverty—the worst sort. Rachel is eight years older than Nicholas, and has been responsible for him since their parents died when she was sixteen and he was eight. She supported him, educated him, brought him up, and idolized him. When it became obvious that his talent lay in dress design, she sent him to art school. She took a job on Style to be closer to his interests. All the time, she was growing more and more fanatical about one idea. He should have his own salon. It would be the most elegant and sought after in London. He would make his name. He agreed with this in principle, but he realized that it would take years of hard work. When Rachel hit on the scheme for smuggling toiles out of Paris, he was only too keen to cooperate. Obviously, there must be no connection between them, so he changed his name, and they saw as little as possible of each other. Rachel provided the initial capital to start his salon. The Paris designs, plus Knight’s own talent, did the rest. He landed his contract with Barrimodes, and success seemed to be in sight…and then things went wrong.”

  “What went wrong?” Emmy asked.

  “First of all, the rumours, and the Duchess’s dress. Then Godfrey Goring, who wanted to stamp out the racket, and had a bright—and right—idea of what was going on. He could not do much about it himself, so he enlisted Helen’s help. She in turn went to Patrick, who as an artist and art editor knew more about inks than she did. The letter which I found in Helen’s desk was obviously intended, not for her dressmaker, as I thought, but for Goring. Attached to it was a sheet of paper on which she had written in the type of ink which appears only when subjected to heat. She said in the letter that it was not quite the same as the ink available in Paris, but that she had asked Teresa to bring her back a sample.”

  “That’s what I bought,” Veronica burst out. “I brought it back to the hotel and gave it to Miss Manners and—”

  “And it disappeared out of her suitcase,” said Henry. “Obviously, Helen, knowing it was there, took it herself and put it on her desk. That sealed her fate; that and the fact that she had accidentally opened Rachel’s case and let some tissue paper spill out, and that she had put on the electric fire…”

  “Henry! Go a bit slower,” Emmy begged.

  “All right. We’re back at Goring’s party. Patrick has had rather too much to drink. He hates Knight, and he shoots his mouth off, without really knowing what he’s talking about. He says, ‘Helen and I know what you’re up to,’ or words to that effect. This rattles Knight. As soon as they have dropped Barry, Nicholas and Rachel have a long and serious talk. He tells her to hand over the tissue paper, which he will burn, as it’s too dangerous. She has to admit that it is still in her suitcase at Style…in Helen’s office. Knight insists that she should go back and collect the case. After all, there’s nothing suspicious about that. She can just walk in and say she’s come to get her case. So they drive back to Earl Street and she lets herself in with her own key. Nicholas goes back to his flat.

  “Inside, all is dark and quiet, except for the light from Helen’s open door and the clicking of her typewriter. Olwen has just left. Helen is too absorbed with her work to be aware of extraneous noises. If she did hear the lift, she probably connected it with Olwen. Rachel gets to the office doorway and stops dead, in the shadows. What she can see is her suitcase, open, and the tissue paper escaping from it, with its markings showing clearly, having been brought up by the heat of the fire. And on Helen’s desk, a bottle of the special invisible ink from Paris. Personally, I doubt if Helen had even noticed what had happened to the tissue paper, but she would have in the morning. Rachel knows that the game is up. The years of working and struggling and cheating and scheming to make Nicholas Knight famous…were they all to end in disgrace and prison? Then, I think, she thought of the Thermos, and the cyanide. She slipped along the corridor like a shadow, put the poison in the flask, wiped it, and walked back down the stairs. It must have been from the mews at the back that she telephoned Knight, and told him what he must do.

  “He was to watch from the window of his bedroom, which looked straight into Helen’s office. As soon as Helen was dead, he was to slip across the street, let himself in with the key which Rachel would give him, and remove both the tissue paper and the ink bottle. He was to throw the key away, for there must be absolutely no contact between them for some time. It would be too dangerous to try and send it back. She intended to report the loss of the key much later on, when the hue and cry had died down.

  “To do Nicholas credit, he did exactly as he was told. He must have been in a terrible state of nerves, and I don’t blame him. It must be quite an ordeal, even for a balanced person, to go and burgle a room which contains the body of someone he has helped to murder, and whom he has just watched die. It’s no wonder that he simply grabbed the tissue paper out of the case and left everything else scattered all over the floor. Nevertheless Rachel, who is a perfectionist, was very angry next day when she saw what an inefficient job he had made of it. He had drawn attention to her suitcase. I
f he’d repacked it and shut it, we might never have got at the truth.”

  “How do you know all this, Uncle Henry?” Veronica demanded. “Have they confessed?”

  “They’ve filled in the details,” said Henry, “but I had guessed the broad outlines. Rachel gave herself away.”

  “How?”

  “It was bad luck on her,” said Henry, “that Beth asked to borrow her key so soon after the murder. Not being able to produce it, she was forced to admit that it was lost, and also to maintain that she hadn’t noticed it was missing. Now she kept it on the same ring with her house keys, and it was a big, heavy thing. I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t have noticed its absence at once. Then, she was upset when I told her that the murderer must have come back to rifle the suitcase. She knew perfectly well that her case had been ransacked. She’d even seen it, and her only emotion was anger. The second time I mentioned it, she was frightened because I told her that I knew the murderer had come back to the building later. By that time, I was pretty close behind her, and she knew it. My trouble was that I hadn’t enough proof. The crucial paper patterns had been burnt, and the ink destroyed. I had no case that would stand up in court. It was at this point that my charming but nitwitted niece decided to take a hand.” He bowed to Veronica. “Will you go on from there?”

  “Not nitwitted at all,” said Veronica, spiritedly. “Jolly bright, I call it. You see, I’d bought this ink in Paris…of course, Miss Manners didn’t know what it was for or how important it was, or she’d never have let an idiot like me have anything to do with it. It was just a commission that Miss Pankhurst had asked her to do, and she was busy, so she sent me to get it. I never connected it with the murder at all, until I went to Nicholas Knight’s for fittings. Then I suddenly remembered that last time I was showing for him, just after the last Paris Collections, I’d seen them making one of what he calls his Paris specials, and I’d seen bits of paper with those funny ink marks on them, and something clicked! I wanted to tell Uncle Henry, but he was beastly and wouldn’t let me, so I thought, ‘I’ll show him. I’ll do it alone.’ When I say alone, I mean with Donald, of course.”

  “You mean, you talked the poor boy into it,” said Veronica’s mother. She had not brought up four attractive daughters for nothing.

  “Well, I did rather throw him to the wolves,” admitted Veronica, “but you didn’t mind, did you, poppet?”

  Donald was looking at her with the expression of a young man who does not mind hell, fire, or high water so long as a certain basic situation remains unchanged. Jane sighed. “Go on, then. What did you do?”

  “Well.” Veronica put her head on one side and looked serious. “You see, I was certain Knight was involved, but I knew he must have an accomplice, because he never went to Paris. So I had this idea. I went round saying very loudly in the atelier and all over the place that I knew his guilty secret. That would get round fast enough—dress houses are marvelous places for gossip. Then, I decided to disappear. Dramatically. I’ll hide somewhere nice and quiet, I thought, and Donald can watch Knight’s place like a hawk, and the accomplice is bound to turn up, because neither of them will know what’s happened to me, and each will think that the other has taken steps.”

  “A sillier idea,” remarked Henry, “I have seldom heard. Didn’t it strike you that after your disappearance Knight and his accomplice would be less likely than ever to communicate with each other? When I found poor Donald stationed on the pavement outside Knight’s atelier…”

  “I paid the flower seller ten quid for that,” Donald remarked morosely.

  “Isn’t he marvelous?” cooed Veronica. “He didn’t complain once. Anyhow, it worked.”

  “Only,” said Henry, “as I have already pointed out, when somebody with a little sense took over. Anyhow, tell us how you actually did it.”

  “Well—we were going to Porchester to disappear, but then Donald’s mother got ill, so we thought up a much better plan. He went down to Essex on Friday to sort of soften them up for the blow. Then I went and sent myself a telegram on Friday evening, and acted so suspiciously…I hope the man remembered me. I couldn’t have done more if I’d stood on my head.”

  “It wasn’t your head he remembered,” said Henry. “It was your legs.”

  “Anyhow, the telegram came on Saturday morning, so I showed it to Nancy, to make sure she knew. Then I put on my full Paris war paint and my red coat and made myself really conspicuous. I bet the taxi driver remembered me.”

  “He did,” said Henry.

  “Well, then I got to Waterloo, and I went into the ladies’. And while I was safely locked in the john, I changed into my old navy blue suit and my rabbit hat, and I took off all my make-up and put on a pair of gorgeous horn-rimmed spectacles that Donald bought me at Woolworths.”

  “So it was you,” said Henry.

  “Who was me?”

  “There’s a dear old gentleman,” said Henry, “to whom Scotland Yard owes an apology. He swore he traveled on an underground train with you, and he described exactly what you were wearing. Nobody believed him.”

  “Wasn’t that lucky?” said Veronica, with a brilliant smile. “He must have thought you very dim.”

  “Not so dim as all that,” said Henry. “I did realize that you’d changed in the cloakroom and disappeared deliberately. You left a face tissue covered in that terrible brown lipstick and your mascara, which you’d obviously rubbed off very thoroughly. That, together with the strange fact that everybody noticed you go in and nobody noticed you come out…”

  “I thought it was pretty clever,” said Veronica, who did not suffer from false modesty. “Well, I simply took a tube to Liverpool Street and a train to Hockton, and had a lovely week end with Donald’s parents, who are honeypies.”

  “But when all the hue and cry broke out…?”

  “They didn’t recognize me,” said Veronica happily. “Not from those awful pictures from Style that were published everywhere. I tried to keep them away from the newspapers as much as possible, of course. I think, actually, they were just beginning to get a bit suspicious when you telephoned.”

  “Telephoned?” Jane sounded bewildered. “You mean, you knew she was there, Henry?”

  “I’ve told you how I reasoned it,” said Henry. “I knew she’d disappeared on purpose. It seemed an obvious place for her to be.”

  “Uncle Henry was furious,” said Veronica. “I thought the telephone was going to explode. Anyhow, the nice policemen from Chelmsford came and smuggled me out. We phoned Uncle Henry at Scotland Yard to say we were on the way, and then we drove like a whirlwind to London, with me hidden on the floor under a rug, and the siren going. It was divine.

  “When we got to Scotland Yard, Uncle Henry asked me if I knew Elvira at Nicholas Knight’s, and of course I did. He said he’d been in touch with her, and she was prepared to smuggle me in through the back staircase that leads up from The Orangery, and to take the bottle of ink from him and put it in my bouquet. Then he told me what I had to say and do…and…well, that’s it.”

  “Lots of people helped me at the last moment,” said Henry. “Elvira was wonderful, and Margery French made sure that the Style people all got there early, and arranged to bring Rachel Field along, which was unusual—her secretary doesn’t normally go to dress shows. I wasn’t expecting Michael and Patrick, but it seems that Margery begged Patrick to come along and give her moral support, and that he was lunching with Michael anyhow. So we staged our little drama and, as I had hoped, it was too much for Knight’s nerves. What would have happened if we’d had two people of Rachel’s calibre to deal with, I don’t like to…” He looked round, with the sudden, curious sense that he had lost his audience. Donald was kissing Veronica with a fervour which indicated that neither of them would be interested in anything else for quite some time. The others were all asleep.

  “Oh, to hell with it,” said Henry. “I’m going to bed.”

  For more “Inspector Tibbett” and other “Vintage
” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press, including the “Inspector Alleyn” series by Ngaio Marsh, please visit our website: FelonyAndMayhem.com

  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  MURDER À LA MODE

  A Felony & Mayhem mystery

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  First UK print edition (Collins): 1963

  First US print edition (Holt, Rinehart & Winston): 1963

  Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2018

  Copyright © The Estate of Patricia Moyes 1963

  All rights reserved

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-134-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moyes, Patricia, author.

  Title: Murder á la mode / Patricia Moyes.

  Description: New York : Felony & Mayhem Press, 2018. | "First UK edition (Collins): 1963 First US edition (Holt, Rinehart & Winston): 1963" -- Verso title page.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017047952| ISBN 9781631941337 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781631941344 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Tibbett, Henry (Fictitious character)--Fiction. | Tibbett, Emmy (Fictitious character)--Fiction. | Married people--Fiction. | Police spouses--Fiction. | Police--Great Britain--Fiction. | England--Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.O9 M8 2018 | DDC 823/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047952