Murder Offstage (7 page)

Six

For the first time in days a brilliant blue sky arched
over London, with not a cloud to be seen. It was still bitterly cold though,
and the snow packed along the pavement of the Strand showed no sign yet of
melting.

The chestnut sellers and newspaper boys grouped outside the
newly built Bush House plied their trade cheerfully enough, although close up
they were shivering. Posie noticed that some of the younger lads had wrapped
layers of newspaper underneath their thin coats for added warmth, and the extra
padding made them walk in a curious crab-like manner. They made a strange
contrast to the elegance of the black-suited men in bowler hats who moved in a
constant stream through the shiny gold and burnished glass doors of the
offices.

It was now almost lunchtime, and as she turned onto the
Kingsway, Posie was relieved to see that the break in the weather had made the
office workers brave the cold; they were out in force, heading for cafés and
cake shops. Posie walked along steadfastly, ducking the crowds of cheerful
girls walking four abreast down the grand boulevard. She was unworried now by
the fact that someone could be following her. If there
was
someone on
her tail he’d have a hard job keeping track of her here on these busy
pavements.

This was how Posie liked London best: busy, frantic, people
from all walks of life thronging the roads; a far cry from the ghost-town she
had walked through last night. The bitter cold of the air and the brightness of
the day brought a rosy glow to her cheeks and filled her with a zest for
living.

She skipped around a resourceful female street artist, who,
unable to sketch on the frozen pavements due to the snow, had resorted to
creating caricatures for a penny a piece. A large crowd had gathered around.

Posie needed to send an urgent telegram. She had decided
that she could not and
would not
trust Babe Sinclair to do anything for
her anymore at work, so she walked into the big Post Office on the corner of
High Holborn opposite the Tube.

It was busy, and as she waited in the queue she had time to
think about Babe. For the moment Posie decided she would do nothing. She would
just carry on as normal and quietly observe, and wait until the time was right
to confront her. Posie tried not to think about what she had seen last night,
and of how much her dislike of the girl came from pure downright jealousy.
There
was
an element of that, for certain, but there was something more
worrying: a niggling feeling which had been there from the off, which just
wouldn’t go away, that Babe was simply a rotten apple in their midst. But was
she just a lone troublemaker, or, as Posie feared, had she been placed somehow
by skilful hands puppeteering her from higher up the food-chain? And if so, by
who?

Posie shivered in the damp cold of the Post Office hall and
snuggled into her thick brown tweed coat.

She forced herself to think of more cheerful things as she
waited her turn.

****

Posie was in a world of her own when she opened the
glass front door of the Grape Street Bureau and entered the waiting room. She
was determined to get to her office without seeing either Len or Babe, and she
was halfway across the room when she realised with a start that a man was
sitting waiting by the flaming fire, reading a newspaper. A real client!

‘Can I help you?’ she asked, removing her hat and gloves. Mr
Minks shimmied into the room and leapt onto the man’s lap, purring contentedly.
Sometimes he could be an incorrigible flirt of a cat.

‘Oh! I’m sorry about that! Mr Minks! Come here, now!’

The man looked at her over the top of his
Times
. He
patted the cat and set him down again on the floor casually, brushing down his
trousers. He was short and stocky, with wild dark hair, about forty years old
and generally unremarkable-looking, but he looked a little familiar all the
same.

When he smiled his eyes creased up in a friendly fashion. He
was smartly dressed but his suit and shoes were rather cheap. By his feet was a
large canvas sports bag, and a tennis racket handle poked out of the top. He
smelt strongly of mints, and Posie’s eyes were suddenly drawn to a bag of
humbugs bulging prominently out of his jacket pocket. He was not police, of
that she was sure. He was not obvious enough, somehow.

‘I’m fine waiting here by the fire, Miss Parker. You take
your time, get settled in. Bitterly cold outside, isn’t it? That your office
there?’ The man nodded companionably at her own door directly opposite. She
hesitated before nodding once.

‘I’ll knock in a couple of minutes, once you’ve had a chance
to take your coat off and thaw out. Perhaps your secretary can make us a spot
of tea?’

He spoke with the accent of the educated middle-class
English gentleman, and he nodded in the direction of Babe’s small office, from
which the sound of ferocious angry typing came.

Thrown by this strange situation, Posie found herself
nodding and walking to her office, wrong-footed somehow. She didn’t know
whether to be angry or pleased at the man’s strange conduct, but then she
hardly had any real-life clients to compare this man (she still didn’t know his
name) with. She stoked the fire in its hearth in her office and then settled
herself at her clear, clean desk. She took out a notepad and pen and waited.

And waited.

When the knock came after what seemed like ages, she called
out in a cheerful voice:

‘Come in!’

Posie started in surprise as Len poked his head around the
door. She saw he was backing in nervously, carrying a heavy tray with the
silver office tea-pot and some mismatched cups.

‘Peace offering?’

Thrown, Posie looked at Len in panic. He came into the room
anyway.

‘What about my client?’ she said, rising from her chair and
hurtling out to the waiting room. But there was no-one there.
The Times
lay neatly folded on the low coffee-table with a stack of other magazines and
journals. Posie bolted out onto the landing, and scoured the dark winding
stairs below. No-one. She hurried into Babe’s office.

‘Did a gentleman, about forty, come in here just now? With
messy hair? Did you see him?’

Babe stared dumbly back, and shook her head.

‘I sure ain’t seen no-one, Miss, and that’s the God-honest
truth. Swear on it. No-one’s been in all morning, except Mr Irving, of course.’

‘Fine. Thank you,’ Posie muttered. How very strange. But
maybe this was what real-life clients did. Perhaps he had realised he needed to
be somewhere else? Perhaps his lunch-break was coming to an end? Perhaps he was
late for his tennis practice?

Back at her desk, Len had poured the tea. He was standing at
her window looking out over the grey rooftops. A flock of pigeons were whirling
around the offices in great droves.

‘They think it’s spring, poor beggars,’ he indicated, sipping
his tea. ‘Look how lightly they fly.’

Posie glowered at him, and took her own cup. He came and sat
down and faced her.

‘I want to clear the air, Po. I know you saw me last night
and it breaks my heart to think that you might be imagining something which
didn’t happen. Which
doesn’t exist
.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she snapped at
him, ignoring the desperate look of pleading; the troubled green eyes which
sought out her own. Even now he was heart-flippingly lovely.

‘I saw you with my own eyes. With
her
. Don’t try and
tell me that what I saw didn’t happen, didn’t exist. And anyway,’ she added,
meeting his eyes for a brief second, ‘don’t feel you have to explain it to me
anyway. What you do in your spare time or who you spend it with is none of my
business.’

Then Len did something he had never done before.

He reached out across the desk and took Posie’s hand in his.
An action which caused a shock-wave of energy to tingle down her spine. She
bristled, still angry, but she let him hold onto her hand.

‘Of course you saw me. With Babe. But it’s not what it
looked like, that’s all. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t what I
wanted
. She
came to me in my office last night about six, all sad and doe-eyed, telling me
she’d been let down by some fellow at the last minute. She had a pair of
tickets to the theatre, and would I like to come with her? I felt sorry for her
I suppose. She seemed on the verge of tears.’

‘She looked pretty happy to me when I saw you both.’ Posie
said coldly.

‘Yes, well. She seemed to recover pretty quickly when I told
her I’d come along; I’d had my own plans cancelled earlier, anyway. She dashed
off and smartened herself up with a lot of jewellery and then invited me to a
pre-theatre supper on the Strand, at Simpson’s.’

‘
Simpson’s!
’ Posie practically shouted. Simpson’s was
a very good, very expensive restaurant much in favour with the bright young
things, and by people who wanted to be seen around the place. ‘On
her
salary?’

‘That’s what I thought, too,’ said Len, frowning. ‘I said thank
you all the same, but maybe we could grab a quick cone of fish and chips just
off Shaftesbury Avenue if she was feeling peckish. Quicker. Cheaper.’

‘And?’

‘So we did. It was a bit awkward really. Us standing there
gobbling away on the street corner, with her in her posh fur coat. Everyone was
staring at us. Babe kept drinking too. She’d brought a hip flask and every
couple of minutes she was swigging away. Goodness knows what it was; strong
stuff though by the state she managed to get herself into. And then, to make
matters worse, this poor chap came up to us…you know the sort, an ex-soldier,
half-blind and limping, carting a bucket of single cheap red roses for
Valentine’s Day. I really didn’t want to buy one for her, but I felt sorry for
the man. And then, what do you think happened?’

Posie shook her head, and stared into his eyes. She was
almost convinced he was telling the truth now. She was also conscious of her
hand, still in his. His strong touch. His desire to make everything right
between them.

‘She bought the whole bucket of roses herself! Bless the
chap, he couldn’t believe his luck! But everyone in the queue at the fish and
chip stall was staring and whispering, and giving me evil looks. One woman even
shouted out “
What sort of fella makes a lady buy her own roses on
Valentine’s Day?
” Well, I swear I flushed as red as the roses. And then
Babe carted them around all night long. Making a spectacle of herself. She was
half-cut by the time we reached the theatre, so I took the tickets from her so as
not to lose them. I was embarrassed. She was making eyes at all the other
fellows in the queue by this time, and I was on the point of running off,
getting away from her, when I suddenly saw you. I couldn’t believe my eyes!’

He clasped her hand tighter. ‘I swear to you Po, when I saw
you there I almost died. I could only imagine what it looked like. With all my
heart I wanted to come with you, to explain. I would have jumped in the cab
with you like a shot.’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’

‘I couldn’t leave her there, in that state, alone. How could
I? A minute later it was all over, anyway.’

‘Oh?’

‘She spewed up all over the red carpet, and some poor beggar
in charge of the programmes had to come out and clean up the vomit. I put her
in a taxi and then I headed home myself.’

‘You didn’t want to see the play?’

‘Not on your life! Not after what you’d told me a few weeks
ago.’

Len took her hand in both of his:

‘Can you forgive me? Say you understand.’

Posie nodded. Her office was very still. There was just the
clanging sound of the typewriter coming from the outside office.

‘There’s something funny about our Miss Sinclair,’ she
whispered softly. ‘I think she may have been placed here, that she’s watching
us somehow. She’s deliberately trying to cause trouble, sabotaging my work. I
think she’s a phoney.’

Len raised his eyebrow questioningly.

‘I was beginning to think the same thing. But look, let’s
not talk about that now. She’s just a silly girl. Actually, there’s something
I’d like to do more than anything…’ and Posie almost jumped out of her skin as
he kissed her hand, his eyes looking directly into hers.

He leant across the desk in one fluid movement and came very
close, his mouth just a fraction away from hers. She closed her eyes.

His lips were suddenly on hers: a light fluttering feeling
at first, like a wave of butterflies landing. Len leant further in, and there
was an unrepentant yearning desire in the way he took her face in both his
hands and started to kiss her passionately.

She pulled away, suddenly chastened:

‘But what about your girlfriend…? We can’t…’

‘Shhh,’ he murmured, soothingly.

It was not much of an answer but it was enough. Posie closed
her eyes again and reached for him, as she had wanted to for almost two years.

Just then came a fearsome knocking noise at the door.

****

Seven

Len and Posie jumped apart.

The fragile glass door was sent banging backwards on its
hinges with the force of a hurricane and as Len and Posie turned around they
saw the Earl of Cardigeon and a sheepish-looking Rufus trooping in.

‘We didn’t know where else to come, old thing,’ said Rufus
simply. There was a strain of desperation in his voice. ‘So we came here.’

Posie smoothed her hair down and jumped up, offering the
Earl her own seat. He took it without question, surveying the room with his
beady eyes and saying nothing. He seemed tired. Rufus perched on the desk, an
image of pure dejection. Len stayed where he was.

‘Tea?’ asked Posie, in as normal a tone as she could manage.

‘Got anything stronger?’ asked Rufus hopefully. She shook
her head and went to get more cups. When she returned she found introductions
had been made, and the Earl was busy smoking a fat cigar.

‘There’s something I’ve discovered, Nosy,’ Rufus whispered.
‘Something I need to tell you.’

He cast his eyes down for a second and flushed red. He gave
a sideways, ashamed glance at his father. He opened his mouth to speak but no
words came out. He was shaking and sweaty, presumably from not having had a
drink since yesterday.

‘Well?’

He seemed to change his mind and shook his head. ‘No, it’s
probably nothing. Don’t let’s worry about it. I just couldn’t stand hanging
around in that awful club of my father’s for a minute longer, and he’s banned
me from going back to the Ritz.’

‘Too right!’ puffed the Earl. ‘It’s too expensive by half!
Our family has always had membership of No 11, St James and that’s where we
stay when we’re in town, not at the Ritz Hotel. Especially now we’re seven
hundred thousand pounds down! The police are a bunch of useless nincompoops, so
we’ve come here. My son seems to set a lot of score by your supposed abilities,
Miss Parker. So I thought you could keep us up to date with your
progress
.’

The Earl spat out this last word sarcastically as a sort of
challenge and he glared at Posie as if she should have come up with a solution
by now.

‘I say, hang on a minute! I’m not sure if that’s entirely
fair,’ started Len, rushing to Posie’s defence.

‘It’s fine, Len,’ Posie smiled. ‘No solutions yet, I’m
afraid, sir,’ she said to the Earl, ‘but I do have several leads in the case.’

She noticed the Earl was using the business card she had
given him the night before as an ashtray and she smiled to herself wryly. She
explained as briefly as possible about her eventful night the evening before,
leaving nothing out. Except being followed to Pall Mall: they all had quite
enough to be worrying about, she decided.

Len let out a whistle at the end of her tale.

With a final flourish Posie brought out the photo of Lucky
Lucy from the depths of her carpet bag. Rufus shrieked and grabbed the photo,
before being battered around the head by his father who snatched it and stared
at it for a long time, grimacing.

‘So this is how I see it,’ Posie said authoritatively,
summing-up.

‘First, we need to locate Lucky Lucy,
sorry
–
Georgie. Then we can track the diamond,
if
she still has it, and also
force her to admit to the police that Rufus had nothing to do with the shooting
of Le Merle. Somehow, she’s linked to this mysterious
La Luna
club, and
she could well be found hiding out there, lying low; she won’t be stupid enough
to return to the theatre. So our next step is to find out
where
the
nightclub is and
when
it’s next open. So far, it’s the only lead we have
and we need to investigate it. I’ve already started asking around, but I draw
the line at asking this Caspian della Rosa fellow for more information; he gave
me the creeps, quite frankly. My betting is that he’s mixed up in this whole
affair too.’

The Earl let out something between a snort and a
smoke-filled cough.

‘They’re not leads!’ he bellowed. ‘That’s all just hot air!
Why on earth are you focusing on tracking down some willo’-the-wisp nightclub?
What a waste of time!’

Posie shook her head. ‘It’s interconnected, sir. I’m sure of
it. If we find the nightclub, we find the girl.’

Len glared at the Earl across the room.

‘Your Lordship,’ he said, not entirely deferentially, ‘one
thing puzzles me in all of this mess. If the Maharajah diamond is worth so
much, and forgive me, but you seem to need the money, why didn’t you just sell
it? It seems strange to me that you left it mouldering away in a bank vault
somewhere...’

Rufus had covered his face in his hands.

Len carried on, regardless. ‘There must be a market for such
a stone, surely? There are rich foreigners crawling all over London right now,
I’m sure one of them would be only too happy to snap it up. Or you could have
sold it to a dealer, had it split up into smaller pieces? I don’t understand.’

The Earl had gone redder than ever in the face. Rufus spoke
up for the first time yet:

‘It’s tricky. It’s part of the Cardigeon legend. It
cannot
be sold. It’s part of a pact, a promise.’

The Earl seemed to have calmed down somewhat. He nodded
slowly in agreement. ‘Out of the question for it to be sold, but out of the
question for it to be worn, too. My idiot son knew that. Safest place for it
was in the bank.’

‘And was it out of the question for it to be insured, too,
your Lordship?’ asked Len, innocently, provocatively. The Earl balled his fists
up in fury but did not reply.

Posie and Len looked at each other with a look of shared
incredulous understanding: it was obvious to both of them now that the Earl was
either harder up than he would have them imagine, or simply very, very tight,
and that he had shifted the responsibility for paying the hefty insurance
premiums onto Rufus as a way of lightening his own outgoings.

The Earl got up and paced around. He stubbed out his cigar
on Posie’s blackened business card and stood with his back to them all, looking
out of the window at the pigeons. He had tucked his thumbs into the belt-loops
on his smart town waistcoat, as if about to address an important congress. He
sighed deeply.

‘I might as well tell you the whole ruddy story,’ he said
puffily, his back still to them. ‘It’s quite frankly an unbelievable tale.’

He was, much to their surprise, a very good storyteller…

****

‘It was 1858, and the Viceroy of India had just
been appointed. He decided he couldn’t get around all of India on his own, so
he organised for some of his pals to come out and help him.

My great-grandfather, the Seventh Earl of Cardigeon, had
known the Viceroy at school, and he jollied off out to India and became a
Captain living in the beautiful little city-state of Gwilim. Not that Gwilim
needed any real ruling, you understand. It was run very nicely indeed by the
local Maharajah, who lived in a lovely white palace in lush green gardens where
peacocks danced about merrily. Happily for the Seventh Earl, the Maharajah gave
the grandest of parties, and my great-grandfather was having a high old time of
it out there...

Everyone was getting on awfully well together when the
city was suddenly overun by rebels, hungry for change and ready to overthrow
anyone who stood in their way. My great-grandfather led his men, alongside
those of the Maharajah, in attacking the rebel army and for a few days the
whole place was a living nightmare.

Slowly, slowly, the rebels were defeated until there were
just a few of them left, holed up in a great fortress on the hill overlooking the
city.

After two more days of bloody fighting, my
great-grandfather found himself standing face-to-face with the last of the
rebel soldiers.

This last rebel was unarmed, and badly hurt, and offered
to trade something precious with my great-grandfather in return for his life
and his freedom. When the Seventh Earl asked what exactly he would trade, the
rebel brought out a great glittering black-as-the-gates-of-hell diamond, the
size of a quail’s egg. He told my great-grandfather that the rebel forces had
broken into the Maharajah’s Treasury only days before and taken the prize
piece.

He told my grandfather that the diamond was famous
throughout India for its beauty, but that no-one would wear it on account of a
centuries-old curse it carried.

“You may have it, sir,” said the rebel, “but know that it
comes steeped in the blood of very many men. It is a very strong power.”

My great-grandfather was a greedy sort of cove, and he
pocketed the stone. Then he killed the rebel anyway: he didn’t believe the man
and thought that he was probably being sold a dud; a desperate story told by a
desperate man.

It was only days later, at a banquet at the white palace
to celebrate the end of the fighting, that the Seventh Earl casually mentioned
that he had been told a story by a rebel about a stolen gemstone. He did not
mention that he had actually been given the stone. He was surprised to notice
that the whole table suddenly went quiet, and turned to him in silent horror.

“Did you actually see this diamond, my Lord?” asked the
Maharajah quietly. The Seventh Earl played dumb and said he had not.

“And did the rebel say where it had ended up?” asked the
Maharani, the beautiful young wife of the Maharajah. She seemed very scared.
The Seventh Earl shook his head, and the whole table sighed in a sound very
like despair. Or was it relief?

“It is not so much its value, although it is priceless,”
whispered the Maharajah to the Seventh Earl, “as its power. It is a thing
destined to bring sorrow and despair to everyone who possesses it. Even for a
very short time. It is a thing best kept locked up. My family have spent the
last five hundred years guarding it here.”

The very next day my great-grandfather packed his things
up in a frantic hurry. He organised a berth on the next ship homebound to
Southampton; he couldn’t get away fast enough from India or from the hospitable
Maharajah.

The diamond burnt a hole in his pocket the whole way
home, and the very first thing he did on landing was head to Brigg & Brooks
in London for a valuation. When he found out it really was priceless, my
great-grandfather became like a man possessed. He carried the stone with him
wherever he went; slept with it under his pillow at night.

But he slowly went mad, poor beggar. He began thinking he
was being followed
–
that the rebel he had shot in the fortress at
Gwilim was haunting him around our great house at Rebburn Abbey; that the
beautiful Maharani was coming to him at night, sobbing and wailing for her
stone to be returned to her. He shot himself in the head a year to the day
after he had come into possession of the thing.

And then, unbelievably, it was the very same thing with
my grandfather, the Eighth Earl.

The jewel had been locked away, a good thing too, until
the Eighth Earl had come of age: he was just twenty-four and was due to marry a
lovely girl. He scoffed at the old story of the curse and decided to open the
safe and to give the jewel to my grandmother as a wedding present. But when it
actually came to it he couldn’t bring himself to give it away, not even to his
wife. He wanted it all for himself. After the wedding the thing started to get
at him. He found he couldn’t sleep anymore; he just sat in his study all night
long, exhausted, fascinated by the thing, turning it over and over in his hands
like a simpleton. Then he took to carrying it around with him in the daytime
too, on a leather cord around his neck.

At twenty-five he quite lost his head over it and hung
himself from his study ceiling, still wearing the wretched thing on the cord
around his neck. My pregnant grandmother found him. She decided enough was
enough and locked it away again.

Fortunately the pattern changed. My own father was a
sensible sort of fellow, and capable of sorting out such messes. He decided to
write to the then-Maharajah and tell him the whole story. It was 1899. He said
he was willing to post the thing back to Gwilim, and he apologised profusely
for what had happened.

The Maharajah wrote back and said they had known all
along that the stone had been stolen by the Seventh Earl, and that they had
been relieved it was no longer under their watch.

Together, the Maharajah and my father made a solemn pact
that the stone should be kept locked up in a secure vault in London, and
insured, unused and unworn; away from those who might be tempted by its
powers...and it’s a pact I’ve been very happy to keep to. I myself have never
touched the thing, never wanted to. I always instilled the importance of
keeping it locked up in Rufus too.

But it seems it may have been working its spell again
lately...’

****

‘Pah!’ scoffed Len incredulously. ‘I don’t believe it!
A physical object can’t have that much power! It’s unbelievable! It’s just a
good old yarn.’

Posie shook her head at him seriously. ‘No, Len.
I
believe it. Maybe not that the gem itself has power, but the fact that people
are willing to believe in its story. Then they act accordingly. It’s like the
Emperor’s New Clothes – people believe what they think they are supposed to.’

‘Anyway,’ said Len briskly, ‘what are you going to do with
it
if
you get it back, sir?’

The Earl shrugged. ‘Either lock it up again or insist we
send it back to Gwilim. It is theirs
rightfully
, after all.’

‘Huh!’ laughed Len. ‘Although when you thought it had been
stolen and there was a whole heap of insurance money about to fall into your
lap, then it was yours to claim,
rightfully
, sir?’