‘And you can count on this child for a welcome, can you?’
‘Oh, yes, I think so. She’s rather in favour of us. Would have stood a better chance if I’d had my handsome sergeant with me though. But I shall come bearing gifts. Gifts in rather a spiffing box from Harrods. If I fetch up at the front door delivering this for Miss Dorcas I can’t see Reid sending me away.’
‘What have you got in the box?’ Lydia was curious to know.
‘A few things Maisie got together for me. Books mainly.’
‘Maisie?’ Lydia leapt on the name. ‘Maisie Freeman? You’re still seeing something of that music hall artiste you brought back from India with you?’
‘Like a leopard in a cage?’ Joe tried to hide his irritation with a smile. ‘Maisie had a first class cabin and was gracious enough to let me share it with her. She’s doing very well — you don’t ask but I’ll tell you anyway — building up an illustrious clientele and investing her money in property.’
‘You know my views on Maisie! She’s a serious distraction. If you didn’t have her in the background you’d find yourself a nice girl and marry her. But, Joe, assuming you manage to bribe your way into the house, what are you proposing to do then?’
‘Not sure of my method yet but my object is to get from the doormat into the Dame’s rooms. I want to see her records, her correspondence, her diaries, her files. I want to shake up her life until something falls out. I think I know why someone needed to kill her. I think I even know who — but I want to get my hands on the evidence.’
Joe paused between the remembered gate piers to admire the scene. Dorcas on a pony was trotting down the drive accompanied by a grey-haired, straight-backed figure with a soldierly seat in the saddle, riding a large black horse. At the sight of his car, Dorcas squealed and shouted to her companion. They both dismounted and came on towards him.
‘Joe! I was hoping you’d come back! Joe, this is Yallop. Yallop, this is the policeman I told you about.’
Joe got out of the car and shook the gnarled hand offered to him. In his early sixties possibly, Yallop was a striking man. His thick hair, now almost white, must once have been black. The eyebrows were still dark, emphasizing the large eyes, which were wary and calculating. He placed his left hand, Joe noticed, protectively on Dorcas’s shoulder and Joe had the clear impression that anyone offering a threat to the young mistress would quickly regret his rashness.
They exchanged a few pleasantries and commented on the weather and the condition of the horses. Impatiently, Dorcas peered through the windows of the car. ‘No constable? No sergeant with you?’
‘Sorry! No sergeant!’ Joe laughed. ‘Just boring old me but I have got something interesting in there for you.’
He produced the elegant box in its dark green wrappers. ‘A thank you from the London CID for the help you rendered the other day.’
Dorcas, unusually, seemed to be speechless before the glamorous object and it was Yallop who broke through her social paralysis. ‘Well, I reckon that’s right kind of the police, don’t you, miss? And I’m sure you’ll be wanting to have a look inside. Why don’t I take Dandy back to the stables and you go on and organize a cup of tea for the inspector? We can ride out later. Nothing spoiling.’
Could it be that easy? It seemed that luck and Yallop were on his side. Dorcas sat on the front seat, clutching the box on her knee, and they set off to drive the remaining distance to the house.
Next obstacle — Reid. Joe rehearsed his opening sentence.
‘Just walk in, Joe,’ said Dorcas. ‘No good ringing. Reid’s gone up to London for Aunt Bea’s funeral. Granny and Orlando took him and Mrs Weston to represent the household.’ She gave a wicked smile. ‘I expect they’re having a terrible time!’
Joe sat impatiently in the morning room waiting for Dorcas to bring the promised tea. She reappeared ten minutes later with a tray of alarming proportions. Joe hurried to take it from her and put it down on a table. ‘Great heavens, Dorcas!’ he said, overwhelmed. ‘Are you feeding an army?. . Just as well I’m absolutely ravenous,’ he added, seeing her face fall. ‘It must be the country air. Gives one such an appetite. Seedy cake? My favourite.’
‘I gave the staff the day off,’ said Dorcas grandly. ‘Don’t see why they shouldn’t have some time off when there’s no one here to wait on.’
They spent a companionable half-hour chatting and handing each other tea and cakes. Joe was not entirely comfortable. It would have been so easy to commit the solecism of slipping into the kind of nursery tea party games he was so often roped in for by his nieces. This was a game of a very different kind, a game in which he was being used by Dorcas in some way. She was anxious rather than playful and it seemed to be important to her that all went well and according to the rules. He went along with it, sparkling as he would have done for a duchess. This was not, of course, playtime but a rehearsal. Mistress of the house for a day and with every prospect of her father’s taking it over and very soon, she was trying out her skills on an uncritical audience.
‘Aren’t you going to open the box?’ he asked, seeing her eyes stray to it for the hundredth time.
‘No. Not until you’ve left.’
‘That’s an unusual way of going on! I’d like to see you open it.’
‘I don’t care. I mightn’t like what’s in there and I wouldn’t want you to see my disappointed face.’
‘But you don’t mind if I’m disappointed? Very well. Here’s my disappointed face.’
She burst out laughing at the sight and Joe was happy to think that normal relations had been resumed.
‘And now tell me what you’ve really come for, Joe,’ said Dorcas as she tidied away the cups.
He told her. He didn’t think that lies, concealment or flannel would get him far with this girl. She listened intently to what he had to say and was silent for a while before answering. ‘I thought as much. I’m sure you oughtn’t to be doing this and Granny would fly into one of her rages if she ever found out I’d let you in. But something rather awful’s come up. Something you ought to investigate, I think. So glad you’re here, Joe! Come on. I’ll take you up to Aunt Bea’s rooms.’
Joe stood in the centre of what had been the Dame’s sitting room and his jaw dropped in dismay. There were few pieces of furniture left and those that remained were shrouded in dust sheets. The shelves were bare, the drawers were empty. In the adjoining bedroom, the same scene. ‘What on earth. .? What’s happened here, Dorcas?’
‘They’ve taken her things away. All her things. They’ve been put on the bonfire or in the furnace. Granny’s orders.’
Joe’s shoulders slumped. He was confounded at every turn.
‘Not quite all her things though,’ said Dorcas. ‘Audrey came in here on Sunday night — after you all left. I was putting Aunt Bea’s dress away and I slipped into the wardrobe. She didn’t see me. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted. It was a file. A big one the size of a large ledger. She took it away with her. Just that, nothing else.’
Joe shot out of the room and down the stairs to Audrey’s apartment, Dorcas clattering after him. She watched from the doorway as he looked again at a sterile room, dust-sheeted and cleaned. The only remaining personal possession lay in the middle of the floor with a note on it: ‘To be sent by rail to Miss Blount’s sister’ and the address in Wimbledon followed. Joe didn’t hesitate. He forced open the lock using one of the house-breaking devices he’d brought with him, anticipating just such an emergency, and plunged his hands into the piles of clothes it contained. Nothing interesting came to the surface.
‘You won’t find it in there,’ came an amused voice from the doorway. ‘When we heard that Audrey had been drowned, I came in and took it away. Made it safe.’
Trying to keep his voice level, Joe asked, ‘And where did you put it, Dorcas?’
‘It’s difficult when you haven’t got a room of your own. But I thought of a place. Somewhere no one would ever dream of opening it!’ she said prou
dly. ‘Come to the kitchen.’
They went along to the family dining room and kitchen in the old part of the house. No stew was cooking today and no one was about.
‘Mel’s been left behind with the others,’ said Dorcas. ‘They’re all over in the orchard.’ She grinned. ‘You call yourself a detective, Joe. . go on — detect!’
Annoyed, he ran an eye over the room, remembering what had been there when he’d first seen it, looking for any changes and not seeing any. What should he do? Shake the child until she told him? Wring her neck? Swallowing his irritation he said, ‘All detectives need a clue. Come on, Dorcas — give me one clue!’
‘You hardly need one as it’s in plain sight but let’s say. . um. . The author of the Georgics would have been very surprised to see these contents!’
‘Virgil? Latin poet? Georgics. . agriculture. . crops. . trees. . and. .’
He walked to the one row of books the room contained. On a shelf high above the dresser lounged, shoulder to shoulder, a rank of dusty tomes, unread for years. He glanced at their titles. The inevitable Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, one or two French ones by grand-sounding chefs, How to Cook for a Family with Only One Maid, The Vegetable Garden and, with a title printed in black ink running down the spine — Beekeeping for Beginners.
‘Beekeeping — the fourth book of the Georgics. Am I getting warm?’
Joe took it down, put it on the table and eagerly opened it up.
He slammed it shut at once.
Blushing, he glanced sideways in confusion at Dorcas.
She was staring back at him, unruffled, amused even. ‘Do you know the story of Zeus and the honey bee?’ As he gargled something unintelligible, she carried on in conversational tone: ‘A queen bee from Mount Hymettus (where the best honey comes from, did you know?) flew up to Mount Olympus and gave some honey fresh from her combs to Zeus. He liked it so much he offered the queen a gift — anything she cared to name. She asked for a weapon with which to guard her honey against men who might try to steal it.
‘Zeus was a bit put out by this because he liked mankind really but he had to keep his promise. So — he gave the queen bee a sting. But it came with a warning: “Use this at the peril of your own life! Once you use the sting, it’ll stay in the wound you make and you’ll die from loss of it.”
‘Joe, do you think that’s what happened to Aunt Beatrice?’
Chapter Twenty-Two
She was talking, he realized, to allow him time to pull himself together and he was grateful for that. ‘Beatrice did something unforgivable,’ he said at last, ‘and it caught up with her, do you mean? Yes, I think it’s entirely possible. Um, I wonder, Dorcas. .’
‘Have a proper look, Joe! I don’t mind. And, yes, I have seen them.’
Tactfully she went to poke the fire and pile on a log or two while he sat down at the table and reopened the file. The contents were meagre. No notes. No printed pages. Secured with paper clips to the plain sheets inside were just five photographs, six inches by five inches, of different girls. He looked at the faces, trying to blank out the context. All young, all beautiful, all naked and in the arms of what appeared to be the same man in each photograph. He had no doubt that the man was Donovan. Five out of the eight members of the Hive? But who were the girls? Studying the similar haircuts and make-up, the kind you could see on any young flapper, he felt he was quivering on the point of recognizing one or two of them. His mind hesitated, stuttered almost, just failing to come up with a familiar name. With a sudden chill, he remembered that Tilly had been about to apply to join this sorry band. And Joanna, if she had answered the signal at the Ritz the other night? Was the intention to recruit her?
He turned the photographs over but found no clues to identity. The setting presented less of a difficulty. The silken divan, one corner of a Modigliani painting carelessly intruding into one of them, were telling enough.
Dorcas pulled up a chair and sat next to him. ‘Now the question is, why? Why did Aunt Bea have these rude pictures? Shall I tell you what I’ve worked out?’
Joe muttered a faint protest but she continued. ‘Was she collecting them? People do, you know. Well, I don’t think that’ll quite answer. Because, you see, they’re not very rude. Not as rude as the ones Jacky’s uncle brought back from Mespot. Anyway — I think they’re rather arty. “Venus and Mars” perhaps? I’ve seen much worse on canvases in France. Look — the focus is on the face. They’re meant to identify the girl. The man’s got his back to the camera. You can’t really identify him for certain. Except!’ She ran to the dresser and from one of the drawers took a magnifying glass. ‘Look — there. He’s got a sticking plaster on his left arm. In all the photos! Now, I don’t suppose these can all have been taken on the same day, do you?’
Joe swallowed and agreed that the logistical drawbacks to mounting such an operation would be insuperable.
‘So they were probably taken over some time, and if they were — it can’t have been a wound, can it? It would have healed. So it’s something he’s hiding from the camera. There’s a man in the village who’s in the Merchant Navy and he’s got a tattoo in the same place. It’s an anchor with hearts and. .’
‘Yes, Dorcas. I’m sure you’re right.’
‘She was blackmailing them, don’t you think?’
‘I’m afraid that’s the most likely explanation.’
‘But why would she bother? She had lots of money.’
‘I think there must have been something else Beatrice wanted from them.’
‘But who are these poor silly girls? They must be so worried, knowing their photographs are somewhere and the person who had them is dead.’
‘I could ring a number and get hold of a man who could give me a list of eight possible candidates but I have a feeling that the information is no longer available to me — or anyone. I’ll have to find a different way of identifying them.’
‘We could just burn these but have you thought, Joe. .?’
‘Yes, I have. The negatives.’
‘I bet damned old Audrey had them.’
‘Don’t swear, Dorcas.’
‘Bet she did, though!’
‘And I bet she went to London to sell them to someone. She would have needed money. They never found her handbag. That’s probably where they were. And now it’s at the bottom of the Thames and the negatives will have been ruined. Good! These girls must be found and discreetly reassured that all is well.’
Dorcas gathered the photographs together. ‘I’ll put them on the fire.’
‘No! Don’t do that! I’ve just thought how I might get them identified. Scissors? Have you got a pair of scissors?’
Dorcas fetched two pairs of scissors from the dresser. Companionably, they sat side by side, cutting out each expressionless drugged face and consigning the rest of the photograph to the fire.
For a dislocated moment Joe was carried back to a winter’s day of his childhood when he’d sat between his brother and sister at just such a kitchen table, clipping and sticking. The cook had made up a jar of flour paste for them and they’d mounted selected parts of that season’s Christmas cards into albums. The sound and scent of Mrs Ross’s drop scones being beaten in a bowl at the other end of the table and cooked on the griddle came back to him.
They’d been completely absorbed by their task. Georgie, the oldest, had chosen as his subject transport — cars and trains and sleighs — and Joe, the baby, had been told to collect toys. Lydia had laid claim to all the angels. As she snipped carefully around the haloes, she’d had much the same air of concentration, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, as young Dorcas.
‘You’ll need to glue these to something if they’re not to bend. I’ll get some of Granny’s postcards.’ She dashed off and returned with five plain cards and a pot of cow gum.
Minutes later she was pleased with their collection. ‘That’s better! I’ll put them into an envelope. You could produce them in any company and no one would ever gue
ss!’
Joe stowed his fallen angels safely away in his bag and was beginning to think about taking his leave when Dorcas exclaimed and went to the window.
‘Another visitor! Oh, dear! It’s that awful Barney Briggs! One of father’s drinking set. Mel thinks he’s a bad influence and ought to be discouraged. Come and help me discourage him, Joe.’
Joe glanced down the drive and saw a fine chestnut approaching with, he supposed, the despised Barney aboard.
They stood at the door with fixed smiles as Barney dismounted and hailed them.
‘Halloo there! I was just passing and thought I ought to call by and see Orlando. Is he about. . er. .?’
‘Dorcas,’ she reminded him. ‘No, he’s in London at my aunt’s funeral. They all are. There’s just me and the other children and our Uncle Joe who’s looking after us.’
Barney nodded vaguely at Joe and apologized for intruding at such an unfortunate time. . he’d had no idea. . how one lost track, continually commuting to London. .
He made to remount then thought again and said, ‘You would remember to give him a message if I were to leave one, would you, miss?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, tell him to watch out because the police are checking up on him. No idea what the old fruit’s thought to have been up to but a goodly number of his friends in London town have been subjected to harassment on his account. Interrogated! Turfed out of their beds at dawn for questioning, don’t you know!
‘I was able, however, to give him an alibi, I’m pleased to say. As luck would have it we travelled down from London on Sunday morning on the same train which corroborated what Orlando had been telling them all along.’ His air of self-congratulation told Joe that this was the real reason for his turning up on the doorstep. He’d done Orlando a good turn and was looking forward to a gossip, joking with him about putting one over on the coppers.
‘Jolly lucky either of us was able to remember the events! Both pi-eyed! Oh, I beg your pardon, miss! I’m not suggesting. . Well, Orlando would be a bit the worse for wear after a family birthday party at the Ritz. . you’d expect it. .’ He tried heavily to recover his faux pas.
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