‘I agree with you, Miss Mitford,’ said Guy. ‘I doubt that this will be taken any further, particularly now that Mr Meyer’s statement has been taken.’
‘What?’ This was news to Nancy, of course.
Louisa turned to explain: ‘Mr Meyer told me that he’d overheard your conversation with Mrs Mulloney at the dinner table last week.’
A shadow crossed Nancy’s face. ‘Were you and Mr Meyer discussing me?’
‘Mr Meyer was concerned for you.’
Nancy looked away. ‘Have you got a light?’ she said to Guy. ‘This isn’t much use without one.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a matchbox, striking a flame at once. Nancy exhaled. ‘Well, come on then. Tell me what he said.’
Guy decided to take this up. ‘Mr Meyer has given a statement to the effect that he heard the two of you discuss the fact that Mrs Mulloney had been left alone with Miss Fischer and that she wanted this to be concealed.’
Nancy continued to smoke her cigarette but her eyes flickered uncertainly.
‘Miss Mitford, I need to ask you: why did Mrs Mulloney want this concealed? It looks suspicious now, the fact that she tried to push the blame on to you. I know this is a difficult situation. She’s a friend and—’
‘Was a friend,’ said Nancy.
‘Was a friend, then. And it’s her word against yours, albeit we now have Mr Meyer’s statement, but if you know something, you have to tell us.’
‘Mr Sullivan, I’m not fond of Mrs Mulloney. She’s always been a difficult woman, if well-connected and good-looking. But I don’t think she’s a murderer. I think she’s worried that it looks as if she has a motive.’
‘What is that motive, Miss Mitford?’ Guy was asking the question but Louisa found herself holding her breath waiting for the answer.
Nancy looked off to the side and spoke nonchalantly, though it sounded false. ‘Shaun was indiscreet. He wasn’t, one might say, known for keeping his loyalty to his wife. There were rumours about him and Clara. Obviously not rumours I knew before I took Clara to Venice, and she never confessed to me. I only heard them after she died.’ She turned to face Guy again and this time, she spoke more seriously. ‘But you have to listen to me, Mr Sullivan. This kind of thing goes on amongst people like us. There were plenty of rumours. Even if it’s true, it’s awful and upsetting for Kate but not a motive for murder.’
Louisa looked at Guy. Was he thinking what she had already decided? If evidence could be found of the affair, Kate Mulloney could be arrested for the murders of both her husband and Clara.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
When Louisa, Nancy and Guy returned to the waiting area at the front of the station, Lord Redesdale was pacing up and down. Luke was sitting on a hard chair, his legs crossed, his foot twitching. He leapt up when the three of them entered the room. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘thank goodness. I wasn’t sure if—’
Nancy cut him off. ‘Thank you for what you did, Luke. I think.’ Then she turned to her father, who had stopped pacing and was watching the group, stupefied. ‘Dear old human, could you take me home now, please?’
Lord Redesdale took his daughter’s arm, then gave Guy a stern look. ‘This nasty business had better all be over now.’
‘It is for Miss Mitford, my lord,’ said Guy.
‘Humpf, what?’ But Lord Redesdale thought better of enquiring further. He wanted the hell out of there. The two of them left without saying goodbye.
Louisa, Guy and Luke were left staring at each other. She knew that she should return to work, but she also knew that Diana wouldn’t necessarily be aware that she had been released as yet. And she needed a grown-up drink, even if it was only the afternoon. Luke looked as if he felt the same.
‘Mr Meyer,’ said Louisa and he looked at her with confusion.
‘Why aren’t you calling me Luke?’
Louisa flicked her eyes towards Guy, who shuffled uncomfortably. Good.
‘I think the two of us should go out for dinner,’ she continued, with a confidence she did not feel, and Luke exhaled a large sigh of relief.
‘Yes, and a huge brandy.’
Guy started to say something then stopped, but just as they had said their goodbyes and Luke was walking out of the door, he touched Louisa lightly on the arm. ‘Can I see you again?’
Louisa looked into his kind face. His eyes blue and large behind their thick glasses, his fine nose, his mouth so full of sincerity with its nervous smile. She wanted, so much, to see him again.
‘I don’t think it does either of us any good, do you?’ she said and left. But this time, she turned around when she got to the pavement and Guy was still watching her.
‘I think this deserves the Ritz,’ said Luke as they walked along the street. He had perked up tremendously. His face somehow rearranged back into its usual harmonious good looks, the curls of his hair adding to the general buoyancy. Only his crumpled shirt and lack of a tie revealed the earlier harried state in which he had had to leave his aunt’s house.
‘No, Luke. There’s nothing to celebrate. Can we just dive into the nearest pub and hide for a while?’ She was regretting not saying that she would go back to Diana immediately, where she might have been able to lie down on her bed and try to think through everything that had happened. She felt the hurt she had inflicted on Guy as if she had stabbed her own heart.
It didn’t take them long to find a pub, the Rose and Thorn, hidden away in a mews and once the drinking hole of coachmen after they had put away their horses for the night. It was perfect for her mood: dark, low-ceilinged, a surly barmaid. They tucked themselves into a booth with a brandy each. It would knock her out but that might bring blessed relief. The first sip burned her throat and brought a numbness that was the panacea she sought.
Luke gave a deep sigh. ‘That’s better. I’m not sure which was worse today, the police interview or telling Aunt that I had been called in. She was much more upset than I was.’
‘Did you tell her why?’
‘No, I hardly knew myself. I had a summons from Diana to meet her at the police station. I was feeling pretty desperate as it was. I had been up until the small hours drinking whisky with disreputable types in Soho.’ He barked a short laugh.
Louisa studied Luke for a second or two. His dark brown eyes were hard to read. Was the hangover the reason for his trembling hands earlier? She always had the sensation that he was hiding something but could say with no certainty what that was. That he was a homosexual was understood by all the group, and though the likes of Nancy and Diana would make reference to this in passing with coded phrases – ‘he wears lavender’ – it would nonetheless be something he had to conceal from most of the world, most of the time, she knew that. Hiding a part of yourself was exhausting. Louisa knew that, too. But there was another danger: it could make deception a habit, something that came as easily as tying your shoelaces.
‘Are you going to ring the newspaper?’
‘About what?’ Luke swallowed this question with another mouthful of brandy.
‘You know what. Clara. Nancy.’
Luke shook his head. ‘But I can’t deny that I wouldn’t like to eventually. If it became a proper story, I mean. I don’t want to live in the gutter of the diary, I promise you that. I’d like to be a real journalist.’
‘Hmm.’ Louisa drank the last of her brandy. It cleared her head. ‘Why are you sitting here with me now, Luke?’ It gave her a small thrill to call him by his first name. Almost everyone in her daily life had to be addressed formally, apart from May the parlourmaid. But the kitchen maids had to call her ‘Miss Cannon’. She’d liked it initially but it created a distance that soon became too wide to cross.
‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, but you’re also friends with Mrs Guinness. The woman for whom I am a lady’s maid. It is unusual.’
Luke’s response was warm. ‘I am unusual, and I have a feeling you are too. Perhaps more accurately, we’re both outsiders. I know I am a friend o
f Diana’s, but only up to a point. I am not one of them – I don’t have their money, their background, their confidence. They accept me as an amusing pet. Some might say it was pathetic of me but because it lets me in, I put up with it.’
‘What do you want to be? Where are you going to go in this life?’
‘Goodness,’ said Luke. ‘You are in a philosophical mood. I think we need another drink.’ He signalled to the barmaid for more of the same. Her response was to throw a dishcloth over her shoulder but then she pulled out two more glasses. Luke took a minute to think, giving the question proper consideration and as he did, Louisa tried to think what her own answer might be. ‘I keep hoping we’re living in a new and different world,’ he said at last. ‘Different to our parents’ world, that is. Since the war, so many things have changed. All the cars, the telephones, the radio. Women are voting.’
Louisa raised her glass. ‘Hurrah to that.’
Luke clinked his and then winced. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Nancy told me once not to do that.’
‘Carry on, I’m enjoying this.’
‘I feel as if there’s a chance for anyone to do anything, in a way that wasn’t possible before. I’m lucky, I’ve had a good enough education and I have my aunt supporting me. But she and I are not the same. She fiercely disapproves of modern life and would like the world to go back to the way it was.’
‘Where people knew their place?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Where you and I would not be sitting together, having a drink in a pub.’
Luke burst out again, and this time Louisa joined in. The brandy on an empty stomach had relaxed every muscle from her shoulders to her scalp and she was enjoying the pleasurable sensation of almost melting into her seat. She never wanted to leave the safety of the booth.
‘Clara was having an affair with Kate Mulloney’s husband,’ she said, rather abruptly. Her mind had skittered back there inevitably, like a bagatelle ball on a slope.
Luke put his drink down on the table. ‘I know.’
‘I guessed that from your diary piece.’ Louisa gave him an arch look. ‘But how did you know?’
‘There were rumours.’ He gave her a wide-eyed look. ‘You don’t think Kate …?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Louisa. She knew she was saying things she wouldn’t have said if she wasn’t two brandies down but she couldn’t quite stop herself either.
‘Can it be proved?’
Louisa shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We don’t know if Mrs Mulloney knew for certain that Clara was, well … ’
‘What if there was proof for that?’
‘Proof Mrs Mulloney knew what her husband and Clara were doing behind her back?’
‘Yes,’ said Luke.
‘I’d say it wouldn’t help her case, but it would help the police’s.’
‘Then I think you’d better come back with me to my aunt’s house.’ Luke stood and paid the bill and inside of five minutes, they were in a taxi to Wilton Crescent.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
At the end of a wedding cake line-up of painted houses was 31 Wilton Crescent, standing slightly oddly next to the Anglican church, St Paul’s of Knightsbridge. Briefly, the thought occurred to Louisa that the street name rang a bell but she couldn’t think why – was it something to do with Guy? But she didn’t want to think of him and she pushed it to the back of her mind.
Luke fished out a key attached to his belt loop on a thin silver chain. ‘My aunt doesn’t trust me not to lose it,’ he said with a grin and let them both in. ‘We don’t have a servant.’
‘None at all?’
Luke shrugged. ‘Apparently no one is to be trusted. Not quite what you’d call Christian forgiveness for someone who goes to church twice on Sundays. It makes it rather dusty, I suppose, but I’ve got used to it now.’
They walked along a short, dark hall off which there was a small study and a dining room behind. ‘Wait here,’ Luke instructed. Then he called out, ‘Hello?’ but there was no reply. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘she’s still out. She wouldn’t like it if she found us here. A man and a woman alone. Old-fashioned, you know.’ There was a faintly musty smell and the decoration looked to have been done some time in the previous century: there were wallpapers with faded fussy prints and Persian rugs on smutty wooden floors. Few pictures were hung and they were all of nondescript landscapes, featureless pale green fields with lonely trees.
As Luke had been talking he had led Louisa up the stairs and taken them into a drawing room that was on the first floor, its two tall sash windows overlooking the street. One wall was entirely taken up with a vast oil painting of a man in what he clearly considered to be his prime, with a grey beard and moustache and a stomach that Louisa guessed had been diplomatically painted to be less large than it actually was. At his feet stood a proud boxer dog with a thick red collar.
‘Sir William Boyd,’ said Luke. ‘Aunt’s husband. She was nineteen and he was fifty-three when they married. My mother told me that everyone assumed he was rich – he had the title and this house, after all. But it turned out he wasn’t, and when he died in 1918, Aunt was left with nothing but, well, the title and the house.’
‘Why didn’t she sell the house?’
‘Pride,’ said Luke. ‘She would never admit she needed the money. And she likes the fact that it’s next to the church. Wait here a moment, sit anywhere you like.’
Louisa sat down on a green velvet sofa, antimacassars draped on the back, while Luke went out of the room for a few minutes. It was quite dark but for the two lamps that Luke had switched on – Lady Boyd’s displeasure with the modern world did not, it seemed, extend to electricity – and Louisa had to wait for her eyes to adjust. Soon, Luke placed a slim diary in her lap, with ‘1929’ embossed in gold on the front. He looked at her with glee in his dark eyes.
‘What is that?’ asked Louisa.
‘Kate Mulloney’s diary.’
Louisa recoiled. ‘It can’t be. Where did you get it from?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘I assume Mrs Mulloney does not know it is in your possession.’
‘No comment,’ said Luke. Then he gave the book an impatient tap. ‘But come on! Don’t tell me you don’t want to know what’s inside it.’
Merely having the diary on her lap made her feel complicit in a terrible crime. ‘I don’t know that I do, Luke. Shouldn’t we hand it over to the police?’
‘Maybe, maybe.’ Luke was dismissive, leaning over her, flicking through the diary. ‘Most of it is pretty standard stuff. Doctor’s appointments – quite a lot of those – dress fittings, luncheon with Lady Snooks and that sort of thing. But then, look at this.’ Luke held out an open page and Louisa lacked the willpower not to look, though she did resist taking hold of the diary itself. If she didn’t touch it, she might be able to pretend that she had had nothing to do with it. The two pages were obviously intended to cover a week’s entries, in January. But instead of sparse details there was a dense, continuous flow of narrow handwriting in black ink that sometimes splotched from the force with which the writer had pressed on the page. The words were too small for Louisa to be able to make them out.
‘What does it say?’ She hadn’t wanted to ask. But also, she had.
‘She has seen Clara and Shaun kissing. At the end of the night, after a New Year’s Eve party in their house in Ireland. It seems they didn’t see her. She writes … hang on.’ Luke moved the page nearer to the light and started to read out loud. ‘That little bitch has had her claws in S for months, I knew it. He told me I was going mad, imagining things that weren’t there and all the time those two bastards were going at it like frenzied animals.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Louisa.
‘No, wait a bit. Listen to this. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of telling them that I know. If that cow wants my husband, she’ll get him over my dead body. Or his.’ Luke raised his eyebrows as he read the final two words with dramatic exaggerati
on. ‘What do you think of that, eh?’
‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ said Louisa. ‘She was angry. Of course she felt like that, anyone would.’
‘Her husband was dead a few weeks later, Louisa. Then a year later, Clara too.’
‘Fine. Then we have to give Kate the diary back but we’ll call Guy—’
‘Guy?’
‘DS Sullivan, I mean.’
‘I didn’t realize you were on such a friendly footing. This whole thing gets more and more interesting.’
‘We’re not,’ said Louisa, too quickly. ‘I mean, we were. That’s beside the point here. We can tell him there are reasonable grounds to bring Mrs Mulloney back for a further interview.’
‘They must have done that already, surely? Given my statement.’
‘Yes, that’s true. We’ll telephone the station anyway, and take the diary back to her. It seems only fair that she should have it in her possession. This is, whatever you may say, a piece of stolen property.’
‘How will we explain how we came to have it?’
‘How will you explain it, you mean. I had nothing to do with it.’
Luke narrowed his eyes at Louisa. ‘If I’m in this, so are you. I don’t see why we should hand it back.’
‘We have to. Either you have to admit to the police that you stole it, and it could look as if you are framing her. Or you have to confess to Kate that you had it but you are returning it, and give her a fair chance to explain herself.’
‘What if we just say nothing at all? We owe nothing to Kate, or the police.’
That stopped Louisa. If the diary was, as she suspected, simply the raging words of a jealous, betrayed wife, then what did anyone have to gain by treating it as proof of her motive to kill? On the other hand, there was a very strong likelihood that Kate was guilty. And the diary would provide some kind of evidence, if not all, in bringing her to book.
‘Louisa, why are you so determined to do this?’ Luke was watching her. But she couldn’t bring herself to admit the truth. She wanted Guy’s admiration. She wanted him and the rest of his department to know that she had helped them to catch a murderess. She wanted to prove there was more to her than someone who fetched and carried for a rich, spoilt woman who was nearly ten years younger than she was.
[Mitford Murders 03] - The Mitford Scandal Page 17
