Lewis inhaled a great tranche of air, and breathed out noisily. He hated everyone at that moment, but most of all, next to Trilby, he hated David Micklethwaite.
‘Look, Micklethwaite, how much do we pay the de Ribes? How much do we pay them annually? Ten thousand – pounds that is, not dollars. And how much does the average man get paid – about twenty pounds a week?’
‘I would have to look the precise sum up—’
‘Never mind the sums, we pay them a bloody fortune, and what is the end result? A few desultory items every week in a few boring little gossip columns. Well, that being so, I suggest, without any due modesty, since I sign the cheques, or you do on my behalf, I suggest that you get off your backside and go round to their bloody house and you extract from them a few thousand pounds of their time and labour, which is a great deal more than they have contributed so far to the success of my newspapers. And if they fail, I want you to tell them they can kiss goodbye to any more money from me. Again, if the point has not already struck home, you may lead them to understand that by the time I have finished curtailing their money they will be lucky to get to Monte Carlo on a bus, let alone in a chauffeur-driven car! And what is more I will personally make sure that the only member of the international set they will be meeting will be in a fish queue. Now get along. Get cracking, or else.’
No Roman emperor could have been more commanding. But they both knew, Micklethwaite and Lewis, that his sudden volte face, his anger, his bitterness now directed towards the hapless de Ribes, was in fact fury at himself for showing weakness. He had cried in front of his hireling and Lewis, proud man that he was, knew that Micklethwaite would always remember him like that, crying, weak, despairing. The fact that he had seen him in as terrible a state before, over Talia Fisherton, only made matters worse.
When Talia had been found dead, however many years ago it was now, leaning on Micklethwaite had cost Lewis dear. And however rich you may be, and however rich you may think you are, money is still money, and being skinned alive hurt. And it was nothing to do with how much you were being taken for, or because you could not afford it, but because you did not like being taken. No-one liked the feeling that they were being taken, least of all Lewis.
Lola and Henri de Ribes lived in an extraordinarily expensive house. Micklethwaite called on them there, without preamble, knowing as he did that he could secure their attention at once. Moreover, familiar as he was with their invariable habits, he knew that they would be in, changed into evening dress and sipping dry martinis prior to going to the theatre, or out to dinner.
He was well acquainted with the extreme luxury of their house, because he signed the rental on it annually. He had also signed the cheque that paid the interior decorators to stuff it with elaborate chintzes, flowered materials, and copies of ancestors that were no relation whatsoever to either Lola or Henri, but nevertheless hung at decorative moments on silk-lined walls every step of the way up to their first floor drawing room.
The maid announced Micklethwaite in a strangled Spanish accent, and he was left standing staring at a scene that he had already envisaged.
There was Henri in immaculate evening dress, his shoes shining, his thin silk evening socks displaying an equally thin ankle, his gold and enamel lapis lazuli cufflinks catching the fading evening light, the matching signet ring on the smallest finger of his left hand bending around the stem of a slender martini glass.
But if Henri de Ribes seemed to Micklethwaite to be part of some tired déjà vu, some previous dream or old reality, his wife, although lacking the natural beauty of Agnes Smythson, was breathtaking in her fashionable elegance, even to Micklethwaite who had, after all, signed the bills for her clothes. She might be middle-aged, but Lola de Ribes always looked not ten times the part that she played with such dedication, but a hundred times the part. One glance would satisfy almost anyone that she belonged to the upper echelons of European Society, and better than that, that she revelled in it.
But of course there was a flaw, a flaw which, Micklethwaite observed to himself, many of her kind did not appreciate. For, having been born on the edge of the world in which she now occupied the position of a queen in her own right, Lola de Ribes had become more aristocratic in demeanour than any patrician would ever dare to be. That being so, it was still discernible, although admittedly only to a very few, that she was not what she pretended.
Tonight she was wearing what Micklethwaite, with his intimate knowledge of her bills and accounts, knew must be a Norman Hartnell dress. Hartnell’s famed embroidery, the intricacy of the work that he commissioned for his designs, was recognisable even to Micklethwaite.
The dress was of cream satin with pink beaded floral motifs, strapless to show off a pair of white, powdered, sloping shoulders. It was tightly waisted and fell in two side pleats from the bodice to a three-quarter length. With it she wore matching satin shoes and – presumably since the dress was so lavishly embroidered with stones – no other jewellery besides a few heavy rings whose edgings of small diamonds, like her husband’s cufflinks, caught and played with the gentle London light, throwing it towards the ornate furnishings of the room as she raised both her hands in welcome.
It was unsurprising given the elegance of the scene that Micklethwaite, despite his own wealth, felt dowdy, inelegant, and worst of all somehow inferior. In fact the scene before him could not have been calculated to have annoyed him more. He wanted to stamp on it. He wanted to deface it. And, which was more than satisfying to a man like himself, he knew without any doubt that he could. More than that, he had been given the authority to do so. He could threaten the exquisite scene which now affronted his eyes, he could tear it down, sack the actors and replace them with others.
‘I think we had better go into the garden.’
The de Ribes both knew, at once, as spies and agents always do, that this was a signal for important news. Their help was needed urgently.
Lola de Ribes’s stiffly blackened eyes slid sideways to her husband. They were meant to be going to dinner with the French ambassador in twenty minutes. She did hope that whatever it was that Micklethwaite wanted to tell them would not take long, but of course she could not say so, any more than she could make it plain that going into the garden in satin evening shoes and a satin evening dress and matching coat was not what she considered a lady should have to do before going out to dinner.
However, since the wretched Micklethwaite was a top man in the organisation that kept them in a luxury that neither of them had ever previously enjoyed, she dutifully went to her bedroom and collected a change of shoes from her maid, not to mention a silk rain cape and an umbrella, because she was not going to risk a sudden change in the weather, not even for Lewis James, or the beastly little man he paid to do his dirty work for him.
Out in the garden Micklethwaite communicated to the de Ribes what he had just learned from his master, insisting of course on the need for secrecy. Then he firmly placed the responsibility for finding the second Mrs James squarely in their hands.
‘But where should we begin? How do we know where she could be?’ Lola de Ribes looked indignant. The situation was serious, but if she had known just how serious it was, for her and her husband, Micklethwaite thought smugly, she would not have looked indignant, she would have looked frightened.
‘You know everyone, ma’am. Lewis is counting on you.’
‘I will ring Lewis and explain. We can’t possibly be asked to take this on. We know nothing about the girl, not really. She has not been his wife for long enough. The doctor knows more. Dr Mellon knows more than we do, why not enlist his help?’
‘This is an order.’
‘How do you mean?’
Lola de Ribes knew at once, in two seconds flat, what was meant, but Henri was too slow to catch on to the implications immediately.
‘I mean . . .’ Micklethwaite stood back and gazed at the outside of their immensely expensive house, the newly laid London garden with its use of back mirror on the
wall and its careful sense of colour, its elegant eighteenth-century lead statue, its brick-paved paths, and its small fountain. ‘I mean, if you cannot be of any help to us, we will not, in the future, be able to be of any help to you.’ His eyes ran over the de Ribes in their finery, his meaning quite overt.
This time even Henri cottoned on to what the horrid little man might mean, as Lola caught her breath and stared at Micklethwaite. ‘You are holding a gun to our heads, Micklethwaite.’
‘Yes.’ Micklethwaite smiled and nodded.
‘How long have we got?’
‘Twenty-four hours, at most forty-eight, I should have thought. Twenty-four hours to come up with something that will lead to Lewis finding her.’
‘But she might be dead.’
There was a pause as Micklethwaite considered this.
Dead. Once again he contemplated the idea that Trilby could actually have committed suicide. After all, he had only Lewis’s word that the note that she had left had not contained a hint of ending her own life. Supposing he had thrown the letter away to cover up the fact that she had actually wanted to take her own life? Supposing Lewis did have some strange proclivity which drove women to kill themselves? Being a man himself, he would not necessarily know it. Anyway, who knew anything of anyone, when it came to the bedroom? Who understood what made up the human psyche? Not Micklethwaite, certainly. Women were just women to him, even if Agnes Smythson had pleasantly surprised him with her open attitudes.
The strange thing was, in light of Lewis’s assertion that the tone of Trilby’s letter had been cheerful, Micklethwaite had barely considered the idea that they might find Trilby James dead. Now that the thought had for the first time become a real possibility, he was horrified. He could hardly bring himself to think of the consequences of such a reality, not just for Lewis, but for himself as well, not to mention the two over-dressed phonies standing in front of him.
Because of course the de Ribes were no more ‘de Ribes’ than he was King Kong. They were, originally, not French aristocrats or even Swiss millionaires, they were not even perhaps Ruritanian. Having apparently got to know Lewis in Canada they had eventually followed him to England, although they were certainly not Canadian either. What they were originally, Micklethwaite had never had any idea, and, until now, very little interest. As far as he was concerned they might as well have been Mongolian goat herders. The only possible reason for him to have any contact with them was for business purposes. Lewis had found them useful to him, that was all Micklethwaite needed to know. And while Micklethwaite had nothing but admiration for anyone who pulled themselves up by their boot straps and changed themselves into languid post-war twentieth-century aristocrats with haughty ways and a large bank balance, the truth was that every now and then, despite their undoubted use to Lewis and his organisation, they got on Micklethwaite’s nerves. So for them to look not just mildly indignant but positively affronted at being asked to carry out a small piece of detection for the large amount of money they were being paid was positively hypocritical.
‘I don’t think that she is dead. You can find her, though, I am sure.’ He nodded brusquely, and a few minutes later he was back in his car, being driven off in another direction altogether.
‘How I hate that man!’
Lola de Ribes had torn off her silk cape and flung it on one of the over-plump sofas. She also kicked off her outdoor shoes, and went to stare at herself in the gilded and moulded drawing room mirror that dominated the mantelpiece.
‘There is no point in wasting emotion, my dear. We must get to grips with our problem.’
‘No.’ Lola turned. ‘No. You go to the dinner. You go to the embassy dinner and I will start to get to grips with our problem, as you call it.’
For no reason that her husband could think of she started to pull off her large, expensive rings, so that what with her stockinged feet and her over-wrought expression she gave the impression of a woman returned from a bad dinner, rather than someone who had not yet graced anything but her own drawing room.
‘But you are expected, my dear. The ambassador so particularly loves you to sit on his table, to be near him.’
‘He should do! I have supplied him with enough information about our fashion industry and manufacturing to keep the French trade figures buoyant for years to come. No, I will not go. You go, and make my apologies. Tell them that, most regrettably, I have a violent migraine. Which, by the time I catch up with this wretched young wife of Lewis’s, I undoubtedly will have. I told you that this marriage would be a mistake. No innocent young girl can cope with a man like Lewis James. You know that, I know that, it is just such a pity that the wretched man himself does not realise it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Henri agreed, not wanting to remember. ‘The man is uncivilised, I agree. But really, I think you should accompany me tonight.’
‘No, Henri. Go. I will stay. I have to find out from someone – there must be someone to whom I could link this whole silly episode. I am sure that I can find her, but only if you leave me alone.’
Obediently Henri went alone to the dinner at the French embassy, and his wife sat down and went slowly through all her address books. Addresses were the stuff of life to someone like Lola de Ribes. She had at least twenty address books, none of which were ever discarded. People were her industry, contacts her bread and butter. She had long ago decided never to let her set of contacts from any one of her worlds, and she had many, know that she knew the others. Hence the multiplicity of her filing systems.
Once she had thought about Trilby, concentrating on all the aspects of her personality, Lola took down her ‘odds and sods’ book. This book of names and addresses, unlike the rest, was constantly changing. It was also full of names that were useful to her in her decorating venture, an enterprise which was only a sideline to her real business of supplying gossip, but a valuable sideline nevertheless, and not one to be despised. There was many a detail of some poor innocent’s life that had been absorbed by Lola while that lady was pretending to measure for curtains or covers, or standing with colour cards helping some inane Society hostess choose the exact shade for her drawing room walls.
‘Very well, now we have to think of old ladies, do we not?’ she asked her Siamese cat, who had just wandered into the room. ‘If Micklethwaite is right, and the painting has been blacked out, then that means that whoever sat to her in the weeks before she disappeared is likely to be able to lead me to her side. She will know more about her than anyone else.’
She frowned. Everyone she knew was always sitting to someone, particularly during the London Season, when it passed the time of day, and made a pleasant hobby. Even so, there were not many old ladies who sat to amateur painters, and not many amateur painters who were the wives of men as rich as Lewis James.
She turned the pages of the gold-embossed blue leather volume, calmed now by the idea that she was narrowing the field, and also by stroking the cat, who, purring in the enjoyment of the attention and the warmth of the room, always soothed any unexpectedly ruffled feelings that she might be experiencing. She knew that she could find Trilby James, just by concentrating on the names that she was staring at so intently. It was as if she was a witch and the addresses the entrails of animals, as if she could see in an address a picture that no-one else could see, a picture of a person. More than that, she was allowing her mind to rest, to relax, to remember every thread of every conversation that she had recently enjoyed. Such was her concentration, it was hardly surprising that within a short time Lola had seized on the right name.
‘How stupid of me,’ she told her cat. ‘How stupid of me to forget such a thing! Gracious, it must be the London Season that does it, too many buffet luncheons, too many cocktail parties, too much of everything, and of a sudden such a conversation goes out of one’s mind! Of course! How ridiculous to have forgotten.’
She stood up and smoothed down her satin evening dress in the excitement of the realisation that the name in her address book would le
ad her to Trilby James as surely as a trail of aniseed would attract a pack of hounds. She glanced at the ormolu clock that stood in front of the mirror. It was still only half past eight, so she picked up her white telephone with its Belgravia number and dialled.
The old lady invited her round at once, but it was only when Lola had replaced the telephone that she realised that Laura Montague had not sounded in the least bit surprised by the urgent nature of her call.
‘There has to be another man, doesn’t there, Laura?’
Laura nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I agree there does have to be someone else in the picture, as it were. But I simply do not understand who would have blacked out that lovely painting she was doing of me. The dear little thing, she is really quite talented, you know.’
Lola de Ribes was not in the least bit interested in Trilby James’s talent, only in Trilby James herself.
‘Who called at the studio when you were there? Do you remember the men that called to see her? She must have had callers, surely?’
‘No, no-one really, not that I remember. I mean, very well . . . no, I lie.’
Lola leaned forward expectantly, her expensive scent making Laura feel a little queasy because she always wore too much.
‘Yes, you’re right. The chauffeur would call from time to time to pick her up. So, yes, she did have callers.’
‘Is he personable, is he good-looking?’
‘I have no idea, it’s always very difficult to tell with chauffeurs. It must be the cockades on the front of their hats, they can give one such a false impression, I always think.’
Lola frowned, trying to remember Lewis’s chauffeur and failing as heartily as Laura. It was true. It was difficult to make out the exact nature of a chauffeur’s face under those cockaded hats.
Summertime Page 29
