Death in High Heels (13 page)

It was eleven o’clock as, with a word to the patrolling policeman, they opened the showroom door and crept down to the darkened basement. The time-switch operated as they were on the stairs and even the window lights went out. “Hell,” said Rachel, laughing out of the pitchy dark. “I shall never find the switch … ah, here it is.…” With a click, light flooded the room; below the stairs Charlesworth could see two suitcases and an ominous big black lump.

“There they are, Mr. Charlesworth. Shall we stand by and hold up the lid for you?”

“No, no,” said Charlesworth, shuddering at the very idea. He looked round desperately. “Here, you go in here, will you, please; I don’t want you to move out of this room.” He pushed them into Doon’s office and returned to his task. “I wish to heavens I’d thought of bringing the bobby with me,” he thought, as he gingerly tried the catch. “This is the most unpleasant job I’ve taken on for many a long day.” The trunk was unlocked and he clicked back the latches and lifted the heavy lid.

Rachel and Victoria waited in Doon’s little office. “It’s sad to think that this is the last place she ever saw,” said Rachel, sombrely. “She was such a bright sort of a soul, one can hardly realize she’s dead. You have to sort of laugh and make jokes and things to keep yourself going, don’t you, Toria? But it’s pretty good hell, really, knowing that poor Doon was killed and wondering who on earth could have done it. What do you think this peculiar young man is doing fussing about with Elliot’s trunks?—there can’t be any clue in them; it’s simply fantastic.” She broke off suddenly: “Good lord, Mr. Charlesworth, what on earth is the matter? How ghastly you look!”

“Where’s the telephone?” gasped Charlesworth, white to the gills.

“Well, here it is, bang under your nose. Shall I get a number for you?”

Charlesworth grabbed at the instrument and dialled with shaking hands. “Charlesworth here. Put me through to Roberts. I say, sir,” said Charlesworth to the gentleman who had contributed the feather, “you can call off the search for that taxi-driver; and don’t bother any more about the luggage depositories. I’ve found the trunk.”

“All right, take it easy, man. What’s in it?” said the great man, reaching out a hand to put into motion the machinery for dealing with bodies in trunks.

“A whole lot of plush-framed photographs,” said Charlesworth, with a groan, “and a couple of china cats.” He put down the receiver and wiped his perspiring face.

Victoria, staring at him, suddenly began to laugh. “Mr. Charlesworth, you didn’t think—you couldn’t have thought—oh, Rachel! Oh, Mr. Charlesworth! he thought poor Cissie had bundled up the boy friend—oh, God! don’t let me laugh any more, it’s making my face ache all down the sides. Mr. Charlesworth, confess that you did think it was poor Mr. Elliot, all rolled up like a whiting, in the bottom of the trunk!”

But Rachel did not laugh. She took two paces forward and suddenly pulled aside the heavy curtains that framed the mock-window of the little office; and Macaroni stumbled forward into the room.

2

Macaroni’s devotion to Doon had not been without a very solid foundation. A foolish and inexperienced girl, she had celebrated her seventeenth birthday with several port-and-lemons in the company of a young gentleman called Ginger Marks; and with Ginger she had subsequently gone to the greyhound races. Flushed with port-and-lemon, and an initial easy win of seven and threepence, she had staked and finally lost her whole week’s salary. “What a pity,” said Ginger Marks, sympathetically. “You could ’a got the ’ole lot back on this next race.”

“I don’t see ’ow you make that out,” said Macaroni, sniffing resentfully.

“Well, it’s Cambrian Hopeful, see? The one I got a tip for. I told you to keep something back; this one’s a cert. ’Ere,” said Ginger nobly, in the certainty of victory, “I could lend you a couple a bob.”

“How much will I get if it wins?” asked Macaroni, regarding her empty purse with growing dismay.

Mr. Marks embarked upon a complicated series of calculations, squinting at the board and affecting an intelligent interest in the tic-tac men. Unable to spin it out any further, he finally announced that she stood to win seventeen bob.

“Seventeen shillings!” cried Macaroni, dissolving into tears again, “but that isn’t nearly enough. I’ve lost all me salary, two pound ten, and three shillings over from last week, and I have to give me mother thirty shillings and I don’t know what she’ll say if she finds out I’ve lost it at the dogs.…” She peered desperately into the recesses of her handbag in the hopes of finding even a lurking sixpence to swell the stake; and her eyes alighted upon a little square envelope. Mrs. ’Arris’s pay.

Behind the glittering façades, beneath the clockwork precision, it is still the everyday human heart that pumps the blood through the stream of commercial life. If Mrs. ’Arris were not present to receive her pay packet, no shining robot automatically diverted it into an appointed place. Miss Doon picked it up carelessly off Bevan’s desk and said that she would see that the old girl got it to-morrow; and passed it on to Macaroni with instructions to put it in a drawer of the desk and remind her about it in the morning. Macaroni, in the excitement of being seventeen and having a date with Ginger Marks, forgot about putting it in the drawer and left it in the pocket of her overall; and, changing hurriedly into her best for the evening’s dissipation, transferred it to her handbag and thought she would leave it in the office on her way out. Now, at the greyhound races, with nothing but the loan of two bob between herself and disaster, she took out the little square packet and weighed it in her hand.

Half-way round the course, Cambrian Hopeful sat down and indulged in a good, long scratch.

Macaroni, in most pitiable remorse and terror, sought out Doon the next morning and told her the dreadful story. It was not in Doon’s character to refuse assistance to any creature in need; she procured a new square envelope and handed over Mrs. ’Arris’s pay intact; she made good the thirty shillings for Macaroni’s mother, and even furnished an excuse for its delay; and finally she advanced five shillings for current expenses, and, highly amused at her new role, read Macaroni a lecture upon the evils of gambling, drink, and theft. Macaroni, bathed in tears, wrote out an IOU, stating the circumstances under which she had become indebted to Miss Doon, and her earnest intention of paying her back at the rate of six shillings a week.

“I shall keep this till you’ve paid it all back,” said Doon, severely, tearing up the IOU under cover of her desk, and throwing the pieces into the wastepaper-basket. “And if I ever again find that you have been losing more money than you’ve got, at the dogs, I shall show it to Mr. Bevan, and tell him the whole story.” She had already told Mr. Bevan the whole story in the sanctity of his office, and had borrowed the money to make good Macaroni’s depredations; but it would be best for the child to have some tangible threat held over her foolish head, and she solemnly locked up nothing in a small wall safe, to which there was no duplicate key. It was this non-existent note which, with her devoted friend Lydia, Macaroni had come to find.

Lydia crept forth from under the desk when Macaroni was so dramatically discovered, a short, stout girl, with pronounced Jewish features and handsomely rounded legs, who immediately joined her fellow conspirator in a chorus of tears. Charlesworth packed the four girls into his car and, dropping Rachel and Victoria at their respective doors, proceeded with his prizes to Scotland Yard. There he marched them into an unprepossessing room, sat them down upon two hard wooden chairs, and sent for a sergeant. Bedd had long ago gone home to his garden city, but Sergeant Tubb obliged with a notebook and stub of pencil, and, after the customary explanations and warnings which the felons were much too tearful to comprehend or appreciate, Charlesworth perched himself on one corner of the wooden table and opened fire.

“Now, then, Mac—er—Miss McEnery, I want to know what you were doing at the shop at such an unearthly hour, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave here until I’ve found out.”

Macaroni and Lydia immediately burst into tears again, but assured him that they were doing “nothing.”

“Now, that’s just nonsense, isn’t it? You didn’t go there in the middle of the night just for the fun of the thing. Why
did
you go?”

“Dulcie wanted to get somethink of hers,” admitted Lydia at last, perceiving through her tears that prevarication would only lengthen proceedings.

“What did you want to get?”

More tears. “For heaven’s sake be quiet!” cried Charlesworth, exasperated. “All this howling won’t help you at all. I shall throw you into prison and let you howl there, and no one will hear you. Now, what was this something you wanted to get?”

“It was somethink out of the little safe,” sobbed Macaroni, appalled by this terrible threat.

“Which safe? The one in Mr. Bevan’s office?”

“Oh, no, not that one!” cried Macaroni, shocked into coherency. “Mr. Bevan would never have given me the key of that one. It was the little safe in Miss Doon’s office; we only keep the old designs and the receipts and things in there.”

“Why couldn’t you have gone to it during the day?”

“Well, Mr. Bevan had the keys, you see,” explained Lydia, taking the initiative into her own hands. “Dulcie arst him for it this morning, but he just went to the safe himself—she pretended she wanted some things about the office, you see, but he got them out and gave them to her. Then this evening he gave her one of the duplicate keys because he’d forgotten to give it to Miss Gregory before she went home and she might want it; so he told Dulcie to give it to Miss Gregory in the morning, you see, because he’s going to the inquest and she’ll be in charge of the shop, or something, isn’t it, Dulcie?”

“That’s right, and then he said he’d be working late, tonight, you see, so I couldn’t go to the safe while he was there, and he said he might come in early to-morrow morning if he didn’t get the work finished, and do it before he went to the inquest, so I couldn’t leave it till then in case he got here before me, and then if I had to give the key to Miss Gregory and she went to the safe … and found …” words failed Macaroni at the very thought of this catastrophe.

“Do you mean to say that you and—and Lydia have been hanging about all this evening waiting for Mr. Bevan to leave the shop?…”

“We just waited till he went; he was a terrible long time, and he went over to the pub, in the middle, and brought in some beer and sangwidges or something, so Dulcie and I went to Lyons and had an ice-cream-sundae each,” elaborated Lydia. “Dulcie paid, because it was because of her that we were doing it; then we went back; and after a long time Mr. Bevan came out and went off up Regent Street, and we let ourselves in with Dulcie’s basement key, but we couldn’t put on any lights or anything in case they showed; we’d just finished looking in the safe when we heard you coming, and we were so frightened that we hid. It was very uncomfortable under the table,” she added, candidly, rubbing her pudgy calves, “and anyway, we didn’t find it in the safe.”

“And what was it that you didn’t find?”

Lydia looked doubtfully at Macaroni. “Look here,” said Charlesworth, encouragingly, “don’t you think you’d better be sensible girls and tell me the whole thing? You’ve told me so much and it hasn’t done you any harm, has it? As far as that’s concerned, you can go right home and think no more about it; I shan’t say a word to Mr. Bevan and you can ask Mrs. David and Mrs. Gay to keep quiet about it … say that I ask them to. Don’t you think you might just as well tell me what you wanted to find and be done with it?…”

Tears once more. “Now do stop crying and be sensible. What was it—a paper, wasn’t it?”

“It was nothink to do with the shop,” exclaimed Lydia, trying to be helpful.

“Did it belong to Miss McEnery?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Was it of any value—any value to anyone else, I mean?”

“Oh, no!”

“Was it a letter?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What the devil
is
this—Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral?” thought Sergeant Tubb, stifling a yawn. “The ruddy kid got ’erself in the family way, and the Doon girl got ’old of the birth suttificit and was ’olding it over ’er ’ead. Why don’t ’e get on with it?”

Half an hour later Charlesworth was delighted with his own perspicacity at coming to approximately the same conclusion. He promised to make an official inspection of the safes and locked drawers on the following morning, and to remove anything that might tarnish Macaroni’s good name; and sent the girls away blissfully unconscious of the interpretation that had been put on their ghastly secret. The sergeant departed, yawning pointedly; and he himself went wearily home to bed. He was anxious and dejected, and miserably in love, and all night long he dreamt that Victoria was trying to present him with a plush-framed photograph of her husband, who kept on turning into a large blue china cat.

Six

1

T
HE
inquest was a formal affair of identification and adjournment. Bevan had been instructed to attend and thought it proper to be accompanied by one or two of his staff. Victoria and Irene, present by his instructions, had co-opted an unwilling Bobby Dazzler to protect them from the over-exuberant attentions of the Press.

Charlesworth, obliged to submit to an introduction to Victoria’s husband, thought he had never beheld a more revolting specimen. The famous Dazzler was a tallish, thin young man, with an admirable forehead and sleepy brown eyes, and was considered by less prejudiced observers to be both personable and agreeable, though he concealed his excellent brain behind a manner often bordering upon imbecility. He gravely related to Charlesworth the full history of Victoria’s awakening to the realization of his beauty and the subsequent christening, while Toria buzzed around him like an affectionate fly.

Charlesworth, unable to determine whether or not he were being laughed at, replied guardedly that it must make things somewhat awkward; and added with polite jocularity that he didn’t believe the young ladies at Christophe’s knew that Mr. David had any other name.