A Monstrous Regiment of Women (24 page)

“Tommy Buchanan is the name he’s going by at the moment. Heard of him?”

“No. Why do you connect Iris with him, other than the circumstances of her death? Oh come now, Inspector, I have to know before I can give you my information.”

“Don’t want much, do you?” He stood up and looked at my half-empty glass. “Another drink?”

“Thank you. The same.” I lifted the glass as if to drain it, and when his back was turned, I took it from my lips and exchanged it for an empty glass from the next table. Its previous owner was deep in conversation with a young lady, and neither of them noticed, even when he absently picked up my lipstick-stained remnants and tossed down the strange contents. Lestrade came back.

“All right. But for Holmes’ sake, it better be good. There was a note in her handbag, written on a corner of newspaper, that said, ‘Tommy, the Poseidon, midnight.’ The Poseidon being Buchanan’s club,” he added. “She got there about eleven-thirty, but Buchanan wasn’t there that night; in fact, he wasn’t even in town. He was having dinner with some friends in Surrey, spent the night there.”

“Convenient.”

“Yes, but verified.”

“So he personally is off the hook.”

“Exactly.”

“Colleagues, employees, and henchmen?”

“Half a dozen of them. Nothing specific on any of them yet, but two of them have a history of knives.”

“What else was in her handbag?”

He hesitated at the abrupt change of direction but could find nothing objectionable in it.

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Money purse, powder compact, lipstick, small mother-of-pearl penknife, handkerchiefs, key ring with the keys to her flat, to her parents’ place, and one to each of her free clinics. A fifth one hasn’t yet been identified, some sort of house key. She hadn’t been robbed, there was money in the purse, and she had a gold bracelet and a small pearl ring on.”

“Inspector, I should very much like to see a detailed list of what she had with her.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Russell, that’s going too far.”

“I could possibly tell you where the fifth key goes.”

He snorted. “You’d better tell me a lot more than that. How about starting with what your interest is. Was she a friend of yours?”

“Not at all. I did meet her, the night she died, in fact.”

“Where? Not at the nightclub?”

“Unfortunately, no. At the Temple.”

“
You
? Went
there
?” A curious melange of incredulity, amusement, and scorn swept across his tight little face. I ignored them all.

“Yes, I went there. Your fifth key almost certainly opens a door in there—if not an outside door, then to one of the offices.”

“Fine, I’ll tell—I’ll let the investigator in charge know. Why were you there?”

“Business.” I exaggerated.

“What kind of business? Last I heard, you were in your studies at Oxford.”

“A client asked that I go there.”

“A
client
? Oh, blimey, not you, too. Who’s your ‘client’?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, there’s a certain confidentiality involved that I’m not prepared to breach just now. There are other things, however, that I think might interest you.” I looked around us. The smoke-filled room had become crowded and very noisy, and we had to raise our voices. “Not here, though. I want to go back to your office.” Lestrade looked exasperated. “I know, but you wouldn’t have let me come up if I’d just sent my name up, would you?”

“Why the—why on earth should I let you come up now?”

I leant forward to meet his eyes directly, then said clearly, “Fraud. Three women dead, probably murdered. Preventing a fourth woman’s death.”

We went to his office.

The room had not changed much in the two years since a marksman had come close to murdering me with a bullet through the window that overlooked the river. The dust was thicker, the walls grimier, but it was surprisingly neat, particularly when compared to Holmes’ rat’s nest of a study. I took the proffered chair, across the desk from him, and nearly quailed before his ferrety glower. Nonetheless, I had to see the list. I told him so, and he exploded.

“All right now, Miss Russell, I’ve been patient with you, God knows why, on a Saturday night when a Christian might expect to be at home. You keep hanging in front of my nose these little hints about how much information you have, but it’s me who talks. Another little technique you learnt from your teacher Mr Holmes, no doubt. I’m beginning to think you don’t know anything about this business at all.”

“Would I do that to you?”

“Why ever not?”

“Would I do that to Holmes?”

That gave him pause, because it was obvious that I, a person whom Sherlock Holmes had called his partner, would not voluntarily put my partner’s relationship with the police into jeopardy without very good cause.

“Please,” I asked, “please, just let me see the list, and then I’ll tell you all I can.”

He did not notice that I had not said “all I know,” but I thought he was going to refuse, anyway. However, in the end he went to his filing cabinet and withdrew, not a single sheet, but the entire file.

“God knows why I’m doing this,” he grumbled, throwing it onto the desk in front of me. I knew why: It was because of Holmes. I said nothing, however, and opened it gratefully. He went off and I vaguely heard the rattle of kettle and cups while I rapidly scanned the pale carbon copies and committed to memory the details of Iris Fitzwarren’s movements and possessions that last night of her life.

There was very little in it that was new, as Mycroft had given the information to Holmes, and Holmes to me. It was not politic to let Lestrade know this, however, and it was just possible something had slipped by Mycroft’s source. I read, and at the end of the pages, I sat back and reached automatically for the cup beside me, which startled me by being cool. Lestrade was in his chair, his heels up on his desk, reading another file and making notes in a notepad. He looked up.

“Find what you were looking for?”

“I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, Inspector.”

“You were skimming through that pretty fast.”

“I was reading. I have a couple of questions.”

“Just for a change,” he said sarcastically. He closed his file and put his feet on the floor.

“Er, yes. Did the beat constable make a regular round, or did he vary it?”

“It was regular. It is no longer.”

“I see. Also, is this list of the articles in her handbag in any order? Or just a list?”

“Let me see that.” He took it, glanced through it, handed it back. “It will be in the order he took the things from the handbag. The man who wrote the report is very particular that way.”

“I see,” I said again. The precise list had not been included in the oral information transmitted. I thought for a moment before I realised that he had spoken. “Sorry?”

“I asked you why it mattered, and if you do a Sherlock Holmes on me and tell me it’s perfectly elementary, I swear, you’ll never get so much as the time of day from me in the future.”

“Oh, no, I haven’t picked up that particular bad habit. I was just trying to come up with a reasonable explanation that would cover the facts. The constable wouldn’t have gone through her handbag, searching for identification, would he?”

He spoke through his teeth, which I noticed were small and pointed.

“Miss Russell, the only person who opened her handbag was the man who wrote that list.”

“Because, you see,” I hastened to mollify him, “she had a head cold.”

“Who?”

“Iris Fitzwarren. A bad cold. A terribly runny nose.” I wasn’t getting through to him. In a minute, he would hurl me out the door. I sighed to myself. “Inspector, why should a woman with a bad cold bury her handkerchiefs at the bottom of her handbag? There were none in the pockets of her coat, but two were underneath the compact and lipstick, and even underneath the paper with the name and address of the club. It’s possible she had her handbag open and rummaged around for something—that might explain why the heavier items were on top—but she would never have put her only handkerchiefs away at the bottom. It was a very bad cold, and on a miserable wet night like that, she would have been blowing her nose almost continuously. Plus, there’s the address, right on top. She didn’t need it after she got to the club at eleven-thirty, but when she was killed, it was found on top of everything else. Unlikely if she’d put it in, but just where it would be if her murderer had emptied her bag of anything incriminating, shovelled the stuff back in, and then slipped in a note for the police to find, a note which would either explain her death in a satisfactory way or incriminate Tommy Buchanan, or both.”

I watched his face covertly as I talked, seeing that although the significance of the handkerchiefs had escaped him, that of the note’s placement had not. My estimation of the official investigators rose slightly. I continued.

“Obviously, if the note had been deliberately put there, it becomes extremely unlikely that Tommy Buchanan had anything to do with it, or his thugs. However, it would have to be someone who knew about Buchanan and also knew…” I fell silent for a moment, then resumed slowly. “Someone who also knew about the style of murders linked with him. I assume that various people know about that, newspaper people, for example, even if they were stopped from printing the details?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Does the
Clarion
have any women reporters?”

“Two, I believe.” He was looking cross again, building up to another, no doubt final explosion, which I hastened to defuse.

“May I tell you a story, Inspector? It is not a long story, nor a pleasant one, and the amount of guesswork that has gone into it would horrify Holmes, but elements of it, I know to be the truth.” He eased back into his chair with an “at last!” expression on his face.

“It begins with the war and the perfectly appalling numbers of young men who were killed and crippled during those four years. At the beginning of the War, there were around six million men in this country of a marrying age, between twenty and forty. By the end of 1918, nearly a million of them lay dead. Another two million were wounded, half of them so badly damaged, mentally or physically, that they may never recover. Where does this leave some two to three million healthy young women who would ordinarily have married healthy young men and spent the rest of their lives caring for babies and husbands? The papers refer to them—us!—as ‘surplus women,’ as if our poor planning left us here while the men were removed. The women who ran this country, and ran it well, from 1915 to 1919, have now been pushed from their jobs to make way for the returning soldiers. Strong, capable women are now made to feel redundant in both the workplace and the home, and no, Inspector, this is not just suffragette ranting; this is the basis of our case…

“Have you met Margery Childe?”

“I have. A woman who was staying in her church went home to visit her husband, and got herself murdered.”

“What was your impression of her?”

“A nice woman, but strange.”

“Strange how?”

“It was… She didn’t seem to be listening to us. She answered our questions. She was polite, friendly even, but it was as if what we were asking weren’t important. As if we had interrupted something and she had her mind still on it while she was talking with us—but, you know, I didn’t get the idea that she was in any hurry to get back to anything specific. She was just… well, distracted, I suppose.”

“Yes. And yet when one of her women comes to her with a problem, she listens with her entire being concentrated on that woman, because that is where her interest lies, because, quite simply, she has little time for the concerns of men.

“What happens, then, when this extravagantly charismatic, articulate, single-minded individual comes into contact with a segment of the population that is feeling unwanted, unimportant, and useless? What happens when some of those people are also very wealthy (remember all those young men whose deaths passed large parts of fortunes onto their sisters), when they are educated and come from powerful families and are so elated at being given a purpose, something of value in their lives, that they would give everything to the person who has given them back their dignity? Yes, exactly.

“You know that Iris Fitzwarren left money to Margery Childe. She left it to the New Temple in God, but it amounts to the same thing. Not all her money by any means, but quite a lot. Are you also aware that another young woman died last October, in an automobile accident, and left the Temple a small fortune? And a third drowned in her bath in August, leaving a larger one?”

Lestrade’s eyes narrowed unpleasantly.

“I personally was not aware of that,” he said carefully. “I will find out if Inspector Tomlinson knows.”

“Perhaps at the same time you could mention that another wealthy Temple member was injured two days ago when she fell onto the tracks of the Underground, just as a train was coming into the station.”

The big building was not silent, I thought in the minutes that followed, just sturdily built, like the opera house it had originally been designed as. Lestrade reached for the telephone, and in a minute he was speaking to a man who, his intonation implied, was marginally his superior, and something of a rival.

“Tomlinson? Lestrade here. I have someone in my office with information on the Fitzwarren case… Because I was here, and she knew me slightly from a previous case… Yes, I do think it’s worth your coming in. I don’t think I ought to give you her name or her information over the telephone… Well, it’s up to you, but if I were you, I’d give dinner a miss… All right, twenty minutes.” He laid the receiver into its cradle but left his hand on it. “If this other woman is in danger…”

“Her name is Veronica Beaconsfield—yes, of that family— and she’s at the moment in Guys under the eye of Dr Watson or another of Holmes’ minions, who would probably be happy to be relieved by an official guard. Miss Beaconsfield is, just to complicate matters, Miles Fitzwarren’s fiancée. He has agreed to take her away from London after the doctors say she can leave, probably Monday or Tuesday, and keep her safe until we settle this. Holmes thinks Lieutenant Fitzwarren may be willing to tell you about his connexions with the drug world.”