Murder Under The Kissing Bough: (Auguste Didier Mystery 6) (17 page)

‘How can you tell?’ he asked sharply.

‘This dress – it’s old, nearly all the dye washed out, but it’s been carefully looked after. Neat hem and seams. But it’s been taken up – see the old hemline inside?
And
taken in, I wouldn’t wonder. No stains, – but someone’s been careless with the acid. See that patch?’ She pointed to a filled in hole at the back of the dress. ‘These old fastenings – they don’t use ’em now – used to leave rust marks, and only acid would get rid of them. That shows its age. Nah, the red flannel petticoat, that’s not so old. Only a few years is my guess. But look at it! I ask you, that’s been
rubbed
and it’s shrunk. Might be the water, but more like it’s been left too near a fire. What does all this tell you?’ She looked sharply at her pupil.

‘Second-hand, Ma?’

‘Right.’ Ma was pleased. ‘Or an anmedahn.’

‘A what?’

‘’And-me-down,’ she repeated impatiently. ‘Now, these drawers – and stays, what there is of them. Same thing. Old. No shape in these corsets. Wouldn’t hold a sparrow’s arse up. Poor little mite. Not much of a life, ’ad she?’

‘We’ll find ’im, Ma.’

‘That dress – ’ousemaid’s uniform, is it?’

‘Looks like it. Any ideas?’

‘I’ll put the word out. See if my lads can come back with anything. And on that other matter, sir. The
matter of royalty. The lads say they ain’t heard nothing. Now that is peculiar. Very, very peculiar.’

‘Why?’ From his immediate sense of let-down, Rose realised how much he’d been banking on Ma Bisley’s runners coming back with something positive.

‘If there was anything to hear round ’ere, they’d have heard it. Unless,’ Ma heaved her bulk off her chair, ‘unless it were foreigners. Now I must get back to blue me nose-wipers. I’ve got a business to run.’

Auguste pushed his way through Cranton’s door, an eager group of gentlemen of the press crowding after him. They were firmly discouraged by Wilkins the doorman. Auguste silently and fervently blessed Maisie for choosing a retired sergeant major from the Indian frontier for this role. How delightful it would be to be returning to Cranton’s if this were indeed his own hotel and if it had not been sullied by murder. He spoke a silent word of encouragement to the shade of Robert Adam, assuring him that the stain of murder would certainly be lifted soon from his handiwork.

In the entrance hall, a reassuring smell came over him – a haven in normal times. Luncheon, and all the thoughts that it evoked. Every instinct in him urged him towards the source of those smells, to taste, to check, to glory in. But he must restrain himself. For these were not normal times.

As if to remind him of the alien presence, the sounds of
La Donna è Mobile
floated up from his Orpheus in the Underworld. Auguste clenched his fists to distract himself from temptation. How easy to run below to glance at luncheon, but he would not. Fancelli had proved himself just about adequate, though not, he reminded himself, in the matter of curries. He was not a
maître
and never would be one. Nevertheless he, Auguste, would not get involved – except in cases of
dire emergency, he promised himself. Emergencies could include the use of coralline pepper or the intrusion of Soyer-like principles into his kitchen.
La Donna è Mobile
. . . Ah, faithless woman!

As if on cue, Bella wafted serenely towards him from the drawing room. ‘Ah, Monsieur Didier, how delightful. If you have a moment . . .’ There was, from the tone of her voice, to be no escape by claiming that his moments were all required elsewhere. Alone and unprotected, he yielded as gracefully as possible, following her back into the drawing room, which with sinking heart, but unsurprised, he noted was empty.

‘Monsieur Didier,’ really she did look so delightful with her pretty toque hat and fur-trimmed collar, it occurred to Auguste, ‘I wish to confess—’

‘Confess?’ His heart lurched.
Bella?
A moment’s horror at the thought of this lovely face contorted by hatred, engaged in murder.

‘I confess that I have been quite overcome once more by the proximity of this kissing bough, Monsieur Didier, and as I should like to kiss you again very much, I propose to take advantage of it.’ The delicious smell of Floris perfume assailed his nose, his senses and his common sense as her silk-clad arms stole round his neck and her warm body burrowed against his. Even at eleven thirty in the morning, this could not be resisted, even if it were polite to do so. So. . .

‘There, Monsieur Didier, was not that delightful? However,’ she added regretfully, ‘Gaston will be here any moment, so I fear we had better not pursue this experience to a further stage. He might be here already in fact.’ Bella looked vaguely round at cupboards and concealing high-backed chairs.

Auguste jumped back in alarm, unflatteringly quickly.

Bella did not seem perturbed. ‘Now I
know
you
care.’ She smiled at him delightfully, whisking out of the room leaving Auguste to stare at the Christmas tree as though it might provide some answer to the ways of women. And Bella in particular. Beautiful though she was, and undoubtedly most attractive, it was hardly the way a manager should behave towards a guest – even with a complaisant husband such as the Marquis appeared to be. He wondered idly once more what brought the pair to Cranton’s. If she were on her way to visit her father, and de Castillon was as little interested in his wife as she intimated, why did he accompany her? He pondered this for some time, but could not provide an answer.

Auguste emerged from the drawing room cautiously. True, Bella would surely have departed now, but one never knew when the Terrible Twins, as he had named them, might be lying in wait for the unwary. Only yesterday they had pleaded to take his photograph, and when he had agreed to this innocent request, and had posed elegantly against Cranton’s door, a long toy snake had shot out of the camera. It had amused the Misses Pembrey greatly.

On this occasion there was no sign of them, and, determinedly steering his thoughts and feet away from the lure of the kitchens below, he walked up the staircase towards the hotel bedrooms. Somewhere there must be an answer.

The eighteenth-century oil paintings of the public rooms gave way on the corridors to less valuable artistic endeavours including a set of Cecil Aldin prints of the Fallowfield Hunt, one or two younger artists who for some reason had caught Maisie’s eye – for eccentricity perhaps, especially this oddly named Picasso. He wondered fleetingly, and without rancour, if it were not the art so much as the artist in which she was interested.

Dear Maisie. Now he acknowledged that it was
indeed in the past. No love so tender as that for one that was gone, that warmed the heart with memory and paved the path to the future with hope. Hope? For him there could be no love without Tatiana. Life would merely be a series of Bellas. He considered this prospect for a moment. It might have compensations, true, but lacked reward. He drew his mind back to murder. For if he could not think of love, and should not of cuisine, there still remained open for his thoughts the world of detection.

Somewhere a girl had disappeared on Christmas morning, probably at about eight o’clock and for over twenty-four hours had remained hidden in a confined space that allowed no room for a protruding stiletto. He and Egbert had searched the bedrooms now themselves, and found no such hiding place. Trunks were in the baggage room in the basement; beds and wardrobes offered no safe refuge. It seemed certain the murderer could not have risked discovery by keeping the body in the bedroom.

Auguste walked slowly along the corridor of the first floor, first to the west, the side that had been served by Bessie. Here, facing the guests’ bedrooms and overlooking the mews at the back of the hotel, were the housekeeper’s room, the linen rooms, and one or two spare rooms, which were kept locked. Impossible that the murderer could have taken the risk of bringing the body up this end of the corridor. No, it must be as they thought, the murder was done on the eastern side of the building where Nancy herself had served tea on the first and second floors. Opposite the bedrooms were bathrooms. A hiding place? Excitement sprang to life, flickered and died as he flung a door open and contemplated the Turko-Russian (self-purifying) Folding Bath Cabinet. Alas, these too would need to be cleaned and would not be a safe refuge. Perhaps the body could be
taken there with the murderer remaining locked inside the bathroom with it, while the bedroom was cleaned? No, impossible. How to know the right moment to leave – and how to leave with housemaids constantly hovering. Moreover, if a bathroom had remained occupied for a great length of time it would be noticed, and remembered. This he knew now, from his brief experience as hotelier, dealing with complaints.

Disconsolate, he walked up the staircase to the next floor. Only two – three, he had forgotten Marie-Paul Gonnet – bedrooms had been occupied here and none on the west side. This alone would centre attention here, for these were the last rooms that Nancy would have visited – if she kept to her strict order. One had to start somewhere and to roll out the pastry by considering the second floor first was by no means a bad idea, since the risk of observation by Bessie was greater on the first floor.

But where could the body have been hidden? This case, he thought glumly, seemed to centre on disappearing bodies. True, this one had only disappeared for a day, but the murderer could hardly have expected it to be found as early as it was. That night it too might have disappeared into anonymity into the Thames like its predecessor.

‘What are you doing, Mr Didier? Those carpets are
clean
!’ Mrs Pomfret’s indignant voice roused him to the fact that he was striding along the corridor, hands behind back, eyes fixed on the pink patterned Wilton as if some clue lay woven into it.

‘My apologies, Mrs Pomfret. I grow too like Sherlock Holmes, I fear.’

She sniffed, unmollified.

‘Mrs Pomfret, those rooms that are unused—’

‘Are locked, Mr Didier. No one gets into them without my keys. Or yours, of course,’ she added
without interest. ‘And I lent my keys to no one. Besides, nothing in them but peeling plaster and wallpaper.’

‘This is Cranton’s, Mrs Pomfret. This is history,’ Auguste informed her.

The expression on Mrs Pomfret’s face indicated that history was all very well in its way, provided it didn’t get in hers.

‘So you have the keys to all rooms on these two floors, and only the bathroom, linen cupboard and your room would be unlocked.’

‘That’s right, Mr Didier. And if you’re thinking of the next floor up, one side is staff and the other side is empty and locked. I don’t have a key. Only you do,’ she said somewhat accusingly.

‘Yes, yes, Mrs Pomfret,’ he soothed her absently. There must be something he had missed. He ran his eye up and down the corridor.

‘There are no cupboards for brooms?’

‘Brooms are in the room next to mine.’ Her tone dared any murderer to get past her.

‘And that?’ He pointed to a door by the side of the central stairs.

‘That’s not a cupboard,’ she declared, glad to have caught him out. ‘That’s only the service lift.’

Inspector Rose looked up eagerly from behind Auguste’s appropriated desk as its rightful owner shot into the room. ‘The Prince?’ he asked sharply.

‘No,
mon ami
. But I have discovered where the body was while the rooms were being cleaned. Come!’

Two minutes later Rose was peering into the large square hole of the service lift.

‘It has access to both the first and second floors,’ Auguste said excitedly. ‘It is just for food, and after the tea trays had been sent down at eight thirty it would not
be in use again normally until the evenings, and on Christmas Day not at all when everyone dined downstairs.’

‘It couldn’t have been in there long without the body getting distorted as it stiffened,’ Rose pointed out cautiously. ‘And how would your villain get the body in without being noticed? As much of a risk as keeping it in the room, eh? Suppose the maids caught sight of what was going on?’

‘It was moved during servants’ breakfast,’ said Auguste simply.

‘Possible.’ Rose stood deep in thought, then shot at him: ‘How would the murderer know when servants’ breakfast was? Suppose the lift had been used? Suppose—’

‘One moment, Egbert,’ Auguste said quietly. ‘I have some supposes of my own. Even suppose it had been used and the body arrived in the kitchens, there would be no more clues as to who had put it in there than there are now. But more likely, suppose our villains simply jammed the lift to stop it moving? Risks had to be taken by these people.’

‘These people?’ Rose’s tone was sharp. ‘Why do you say “
these
”, Auguste?’

‘Because I think two must have been involved, my friend. I have thought it out logically as I would a receipt for a sauce to complement a
plat
. The basis, then the added ingredients, and the flavourings, or herbs or spices. All must be in harmony. There must be more than one person involved in a plot to kill the Prince. True, Sipido acted alone in Brussels last April – but he was crazed. For a plot, there must be brains to plan and perhaps technical knowledge to carry it out.’

‘There’s both here all right,’ observed Rose. ‘Strength to put a girl’s body into a lift, strength to get rid of it at night into the chest. And why the chest,
Auguste? Why not leave it in the lift, lower it right down to the service area and get rid of it the same way as the last one – out through the cellars? Why the chest?’