Lord Foxbridge Butts In (5 page)

“You are looking very fine this evening, Lord Foxbridge,” a middle-aged gentleman with a difficult-to-place accent leaned against the bar beside me, “You must be going to Lady
 Paxton’s ball.”

“Yes, I am,” I agreed, turning a little toward him; he was a handsome old buffer with a leonine mass of gleaming white hair, a matching Imperial beard and mustache, and immaculate evening clothes tarted up with a glittering Order of some kind on a red ribbon hanging just under his old-fashioned narrow white tie.  He was short and a bit circular in shape, but not so unattractive for it.

“I am Baron van der Swertz,” he bowed stiffly, giving me to understand that he and his accent were Dutch.

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” I replied, “What are you having?”

“A small cordial of Chartreuse would be most welcome, thank you.”

“Are you in London on diplomatic business, Baron?” I asked after we’d raised our glasses to each other.

“I
am
, Lord Foxbridge,” he bowed again, this time more deeply, apparently pleased that I’d placed his profession without having to be told; but really, the Order and the Imperial were dead giveaways, “I am attached to a small commission having business with your government.”

“That must be jolly good fun,” I considered, imagining myself in the Diplomatic, a not-unheard-of profession for one of my rank, “Traveling and meeting people and whatnot.”

“Fun?” the Baron seemed to shrug without actually moving his shoulders, rather a neat trick, “It has some attractions and amusements, but also many long tedious hours of arguments, suspicions, and contracts. One does not always see mankind at his best in a conference room.”

“How tiresome for you,” I commiserated off-handedly, “Would you care to walk with me to the ball? It’s only one street away, and a lovely night out.”

“Is it
that
close?” the Baron raised his eyebrows, “I never know how far away things are in this city. But, with the reputation of my country in my hands, I cannot arrive at a ball on foot. I have hired a car. Perhaps you will join me, instead?”

“I’d be delighted!” I laughed, amused by the silliness of hiring a car to drive perhaps a thousand feet just so you don’t look like you couldn’t afford to hire a car. After finishing our drinks, the Baron took my arm and we strolled out of the hotel, encountering a very shiny Daimler manned by a very shiny chauffeur who gave me a naughty little wink when he handed me into the back.

When we arrived at the ball, after fifteen minutes in traffic when it would have taken five minutes to walk, the Baron very courteously but very firmly distanced himself from me, indicating that I should go on up while he idled away a few moments in the cloakroom. I supposed, in his position, it wouldn’t be quite
pukka
to show up with a pretty boy on his arm, no matter how well-connected the pretty boy might be.

I spent the first hours of the ball spreading myself liberally among the débutantes, signing myself onto a different girl’s card for each dance, even picking a few wallflowers out of the deep corners, taking them for strolls along the terrace afterward and being vacuously charming to their parents and chaperones when I returned them to their perches. I went in to supper with Lady Caroline Chatroy, the glamorous daughter of the Duke of Buckland and a veteran ball-goer in her third Season, who kept me reduced to helpless giggles with her wittily vicious estimations of our fellow guests; toward the end of the night, I was able to surround myself with the company of my own sex in the card room, where I joined a very chatty game of poker that lasted until the wee hours and increased my wealth by seventy-eight pounds and five shillings.

The sky was that lovely pearlescent gray that comes before rosy-fingered dawn peeks over the trees in the Park when I left Paxton House and strolled back home, and the hotel was only just beginning to stir to life with tired-looking houseboys sweeping the carpets and swabbing the marble steps. When I got to my room, I found a plate of sandwiches under a silver dome, a very thoughtful gesture on Pond’s part, which I ate while wriggling out of my stale clothes and kicking my shoes across the room. I looked out the window to see if Count Gryzynsky was up yet, knowing him to be an early riser; but though his curtains appeared to be open, the windows were closed and dark.

Stretching out on my stomach across my turned-down bed, I pulled my diary out of the bedside table and jotted down my memories of the day, a habit I’d gotten into at Eton and still kept up out of custom, and to which I frequently refer as I pen these little reminiscences.

The entry was mostly a bare list of the things I’d done that day and the names of people I’d met, but also a couple of things that other people had said (including several of Lady Caroline’s barbed
mots
) and descriptions of interesting things I’d seen. I also wrote an explicit account of my morning with the Count, which served to get me rather worked up, necessitating a trip to the bathroom before I could sleep (where a more virtuous boy would have had a cold shower, but
I
had what in Cockney rhyming-slang is called an ‘Arthur,’ after famed industrialist J. Arthur Rank). And so, as Pepys used to say, to bed.

*****

It was still technically morning when I got up the next day, but only just; I had that lovely drowsy feeling that one gets after being up all night and sleeping late the next day, and I lolled on the sheets for a good long while before Pond came in with my coffee and my breakfast, which I learned he’d had to cook himself in the little pantry in the passage, since the kitchens stopped serving breakfast some hours earlier. I repaid this favor by praising his eggs to Heaven and making pretty compliments to his toast — and I wasn’t just being fulsome, he was an excellent hand at bacon and eggs.

When I finished eating, I slid out of bed and into my dressing-gown, and strolled around my rooms with my coffee and cigarette; I noticed a number of favorite old bibelots from my Oxford rooms had been unpacked and scattered about with that artistic negligence that makes a room so cozy — I also noticed a number of new silver and china ‘articles of domestic use’ here and there, stamp-boxes and match-cases and suchlike, and began to dread the bill from Asprey.

When my perambulations took me close to the windows, I glanced across at Count Gryzynsky’s windows again, which had become something of a habit ever since that first day when I saw him leap naked across the room. The sun was shining straight down into the courtyard, so it took a moment for my eyes to adjust sufficiently to see if the Count was at home or not.

I uttered a vivid oath and dropped my coffee cup when I saw the body hanging from the ceiling. It looked like the Count, had the same build and the same curly dark hair, but it was facing away from me so I held out hope that it might not be him, it might be some other unfortunate who’d taken the room after the Count checked out, in order to end it all in pleasant surroundings —
if
the Count had checked out, which I did not know.

“Pond!” I called out in some panic, “POND!!”

“My lord?” he came running in a moment later, struggling into his black jacket.

“Get the manager, there’s been a suicide across the way,” I pointed dramatically out the window, which drew Pond across the room to see what I was pointing at.

“Godalmighty!” he gasped, shocked out of his professional reserve, but then slipped back into it with a “Very disturbing, my lord. I shall alert Mr.  Delagardie.”

He dashed off, and I tore my eyes away from the gruesome spectacle long enough to throw myself into some clothes, which turned out to be the tennis whites Pond had laid out when I told him that Lady Caroline had invited me for lunch and lawn-tennis at Buckland House that afternoon. I was hopping into my shoes as I made my way down the gallery and up the half-flight to the corridor of the front block of the house, where a number of porters and bellboys led by Mr. Delagardie were clustered around a door with a brass number three on it.

“Count Gryzynsky?” Mr.  Delagardie called out while pounding on the door; when that got no results, he pulled out his pass-key and unlocked the door; it would not open, however, appearing to have been bolted or barricaded on the other side. For no reason I could fathom, the distressed manager turned to
me
and wailed, “What are we to do?”

“Is there any other way into the room?” I asked, “A communicating door with the next room?”

“No, my lord, this is the only way in,” Delagardie was close to tears.

“No, it isn’t,” I remembered the Count clambering across to my room the morning before; I went down to the gallery, the entire entourage following me like the children of Hamelin, and opened the window onto the little wrought-iron balcony closest to the wall. With a great deal more trepidation than the dancer had displayed, I shakily hoisted myself up onto the rail and edged toward the corner, where it took me three tries to get a leg up onto the decorative ledge; once there, though, I was able to pull myself up with my fingers in the spaces between the bricks, and slowly inched my way to the nearest window of the Count’s room. It was latched, but not bolted, and it only required a healthy shove (which nearly threw me off the ledge) to gain access.

Scrambling into the room, I came to a stop right behind the body hanging from the light-fixture in the ceiling. It was definitely a corpse, and not a practical joke as I’d briefly hoped. It was wearing a white cotton nightshirt that fell to the knees, which struck me as odd — the Count didn’t seem the nightshirt-wearing type.

The rope was a common-enough piece of jute as used by carters and builders, looped over the small chandelier and tied off on the leg of the bed. A chair lay on its side beneath the dangling feet, and another was shoved under the handle of the door, which had been bolted and reinforced with the edge of the wardrobe pushed up against it. It was like one of those illustrations in a detective magazine where the reader is invited to find something wrong in the picture.
Very
odd.

Moving around to the front, I looked up into the corpse’s face, but it was swollen and purple and curtained with loosely curling dark hair. It
might
very well be the Count, but there was still room for doubt, and for hope. I did not pretend that I was in love with the Count, wasn’t even sure I really liked him; but I couldn’t bear the idea of someone I knew so intimately being so dead.

After making a quick inspection to see if anything else was unusual or out of place, I went over to the door and pulled the wardrobe out of the way (which took a bit of doing, it was so heavy), and drew the bolt to let the rest of the delegation into the room. Delagardie tottered in his tracks and looked ready to faint; the staff clustered around him with a variety of gasps and oaths, and Pond gaped with horror at the grimy soot and brick-dust smeared across the front of my white sweater and flannels.

One of the bellboys knelt down by the bed to untie the rope, in view of bringing the body into a more dignified and comfort-able position; but another cautioned him not to touch anything, as the police were likely to ask about it.

“
Police
?!” Delagardie nearly screamed and fell back into the arms of a waiting porter, “Police in
this
hotel? Oh, we are
ruined
!”

“Perhaps not,” I thought immediately of Twister: I didn’t think he’d be allowed to investigate the death alone, and I imagined he was too honourable to countenance a cover-up; but he
would
know how to handle his colleagues with tact, and would hopefully assist in screening the true nature of the hotel’s carefully selected clientele. I reached for the telephone but realized it might have incriminating fingerprints on it, so begged the hotel staff to stand guard outside the room while Pond and I returned to my rooms to communicate with Scotland Yard.

I got Twister’s card out of my note-case and sat down at the desk in the sitting room, dialing the number myself rather than waiting for the exchange. After many clickings and misdirections, I was finally connected.

“Detective Sergeant Paget, here,” his voice sounded so efficient and authoritative that I relaxed immediately.

“Twister? It’s Foxy Saint-Clair, I met you with Bunny Vavasor at Brooks’s the other day?”

“Of course, Lord Foxbridge, I remember you. What can I do for your lordship?”

“Um, well,” I was taken very much aback by the distant formality; but then I realized that there must be other people in the room listening to his end of the conversation, “There’s been a spot of trouble here at my hotel, I was hoping you could step around to assist and advise.”

“Has a crime been committed, Lord Foxbridge?” he inquired in a slightly bored voice. I could almost hear him rolling his eyes at his colleagues.

“I’m not sure,” I snapped a little, annoyed, “I was hoping you could tell me. It’s rather too delicate to discuss on the telephone.
Can
you come ‘round?”

“I’m happy to assist, my lord. I can be there in a few minutes. What is the address?”

I told him and he rang off abruptly, leaving me staring at the instrument for a stunned moment before returning the receiver to its cradle — whereupon Pond became quite terse with me about my besmirched tennis whites, and more or less forced me to change into a proper suit and phone to Lady Caroline with my regrets for not being able to attend luncheon after all. It was just like having a nanny again, except that Pond was much more subtle than Nanny had been, making his orders sound like gentle reminders of things I
would
have thought of by myself if I hadn’t been so upset.