The Crimson Rooms (33 page)

She was still for a moment, not reacting even by putting her hand to her reddening cheek. Then she closed her eyes briefly, drew a deep breath, and left the room.

I
t rained sporadically
all the way through Stella’s funeral. We had to prop our umbrellas in the porch, where they were so numerous that I wondered if I would ever recognize mine again. Trickles ran across the flagstones and collected in a puddle by the step. Inside, the church smelled of wet fabric and lilies and I was confronted by rows of black-clad backs and heavy hats. Stella’s mother, Mrs. Hobhouse, had feared that there would be a lack of mourners but instead there were rather too many and I saw her glance around in bewilderment at the crowd of strangers: reporters, voyeurs, and police officers. The coffin, in lonely splendor on plush-covered trestles, was decorated with a single wreath of roses, placed above Stella’s smashed heart.

In between hymns, we heard the wind bluster on the windows and a sudden spatter of hail. It was fitting somehow that a girl who had died violently in sunshine should be laid to rest in rain. Since the war, all churchgoing had seemed to me inexorably connected to death rather than resurrection. My brother’s memorial service, held in the church we’d attended all our lives, had left me untouched, even faintly bored, and I was outraged when later I saw his name inscribed on the plaque in the side chapel among the other war dead. How dare they confirm something I didn’t believe to be true? My father’s death, on the other hand, had been marked by the same kind of bombast that featured in most aspects of his latter years. He was buried with considerable ceremony, mourned by a congregation of senior legal colleagues in their tailored coats and top hats. The address from the pulpit was by an archdeacon, because our vicar didn’t consider himself to be quite grand enough, and the wake had been in the gloomy parlor of a hotel near Baker Street. What I remembered most was the smell, at midday, of last night’s whiskey and cigarettes.

They were a sorry parade in my mind, Brother, Father, Stella, and behind them a million others. Waste, waste. I stared at the coffin and willed that girl to rise up and tell me the truth. What happened, Stella? Why did someone believe you needed to die?

A couple of pews ahead of me, an older man and a young woman stood a little apart from each other. I recognized Carole Mangan, the waitress at Lyons, by her bony shoulders clothed in a too-large black coat and the wisps of her fine blond hair sticking out from under her hat. Stella’s family was clustered together, except for the husband of the disdainful sister, Julie. He had been consigned to the pew behind and remained seated throughout. The hymns were so conventional that they could only have been chosen by people who rarely went to church, and the vicar gave a brief, embarrassed address about a young girl’s life cut off in its prime by a wicked act, presumably a deranged mind . . . so much killing and death already this century, you’d think we’d had enough bloodshed. . . . In the end his voice trailed away as if he was worn out by the futility of his own words.

And then we all trooped out, jostled in the porch to retrieve our umbrellas and straggled down a path under a yew tree oozing rain to a square of land that had been newly annexed to form an extension to the cemetery. Poor Stella had again been shortchanged. If it were me, I would much rather lie among the snugly lichened or half-fallen gravestones in the old churchyard than in a bit of virgin earth that had hitherto been wasteland.

I stood well back from the other mourners, feeling more than ever an intruder, and wondered if any of them knew secrets about Stella, notably where she had found the bronze dancer that was even now weighing down my briefcase. If Meredith was right about its value, no one here was moneyed enough to have given the statue as a present—worn shoes, uneven hems, ill-fitting coats, and greasy hat-brims all betokened shortage of funds—except perhaps the elderly gent who had accompanied Carole Mangan, a senior figure from Lyons who wasted no opportunity to point out to the press the showy wreath sent by the company as a mark of respect, and then shook Mr. Hobhouse heartily by the hand and drove off in a waiting taxi, far too important to linger.

After he’d gone, Miss Mangan, who had been standing at the edge of the grave, glanced over her shoulder and shifted surreptitiously toward me, as if afraid of drawing attention to herself. Rain had reddened the end of her nose and her skin was made sallow by her black costume. She had brought me a wedding photograph, different from the one on Mrs. Hobhouse’s mantel, because this was of the bride and groom and all the guests, including Carole herself wearing a pale, drooping dress and a hat with a turned-up brim. Stella’s smile, as in the other photograph, was like a model’s in a fashion plate.

“Do you know who everyone is?” I asked.

“Stella went through it with me but I don’t remember them all, no. Most were family friends. There were three of us from work. You can borrow it if you like.”

“Can you spare a moment to talk to me?”

“I have to be back in the restaurant by one.”

“May I travel with you some of the way perhaps? Are you going by bus?”

We said good-bye to Mrs. Hobhouse, who wore a dazed smile and scarcely seemed to know who we were, then set off through the now half-hearted fall of rain toward the omnibus stop. “I have the list you asked for as well,” Carole said as soon as we were alone, and withdrew a handwritten sheet from her bag. “We did our best, me and the other girls. We argued over some. Number three, for instance, we was never quite sure if he came to look at Stell or Jeannie—Jeannie left about the same time as Stell. And seven is so poor he hardly seemed worth mentioning. She’d never have bothered with him.”

“Do any of these men still come to the tea shop?”

“A few. The wheelchair boy sometimes. Before she left, or at least before they found out she was getting married, they was all regulars.”

“Did the police ask about any of these men?”

“Obviously. I gave them the same list, just told them, didn’t write them down. But they didn’t seem that interested after I said Stella had never gone out with any of them.”

“How did you know? How could you be sure?”

“Stephen met her most days after work. I don’t see how she could have kept another man hidden from him or me, for that matter.”

“There must have been some occasions when Stephen wasn’t able to meet her. What about her lunch breaks or days off?”

She shrugged. “We had few enough days off and I presume she spent most of them with Stephen. At lunchtime we often get less than half an hour. Of course I don’t know what she did with every minute. I only know what she told me and it was pretty ordinary stuff and, for the past few months, errands to do with the wedding. Sometimes I would go with her at the last minute—she never minded, so I doubt she was having secret assignations.”

“The thing is, Carole, there are one or two things I’ve found that don’t quite fit into the picture I have of Stella. For instance, when I was in her house I couldn’t help noticing she had beautiful clothes, especially underwear.”

Carole blushed. “She loved clothes. She’d have starved to save for a pair of silk stockings.”

The omnibus came and we sat side by side on the top deck, I with the umbrella propped between my knees. It took several minutes for the conductor to reach us but I waited until we’d paid for our tickets before I showed Carole the scrap of paper I’d found in Stella’s sponge bag. “Do you know where this ticket is from?”

“No idea. It’s nothing to do with Lyons, I can tell you that.”

“And here’s something else I want you to see.” I opened my case and showed her the dancer lying in its nest of tissue. “I found it in Stella’s old bedroom, in Acton. I think it might be worth quite a lot of money.”

She peered into the case. “Never seen it in my life.”

“You don’t think the manager, for instance, that man who was here, might have given it as a wedding present.”

“Are you joking? We had a whip-’round for the tea set, like I said, but the manager didn’t chip in. We had to plead with him to let us have a bob or two for her leaving party.”

“What about someone from your list?”

She shook her head. Then she gave me a sidelong glance and said, “There is something that I should mention while I have the chance, though it’s nothing much. Do you remember I told you that Stella was nearly always on time? It’s preyed on my mind ever since, because one day in April, a couple of weeks before her wedding, she come in at about ten o’clock, two hours late, with mud on her shoes and her dress all crumpled, and it was obvious she hadn’t been home all night.”

“Her sister thought she’d once stayed out dancing at the Trocadero and missed the last bus home.”

“She hadn’t been dancing that night. She wasn’t wearing dancing shoes. When I asked her why she was late she just said she’d overslept and missed the bus. But I knew she was lying.”

“She had mud on her shoes?”

“That’s it. She wore outdoor shoes and changed when she got to work. But I saw them in the cloakroom, caked with mud and little bits of grass, you know, when you’ve walked across a muddy lawn that’s just mown. And her coat had a stain on it too, like a brown smear. And I knew she’d done something she was ashamed of, because of the way she behaved the rest of the day. It was always the same, when she’d been unkind or gone too far mimicking a customer or some such, she always went quiet and tearful and would hug me again and again as if she wanted to be sure and make someone love her. She was like that all morning, couldn’t do enough for the customers but kept looking at the door, as if she were expecting someone, or coming up to me in the kitchen and kissing me.”

“So where do you think she had been?”

“I have no idea, that’s the thing. Somewhere not that nice. The coat had an odd smell, you know, like it had been left in a damp bathroom. Oh yes, it made me think of hospital wards or an old bloke we have in sometimes who doesn’t wash himself.” She glanced at me anxiously. “And to be fair, I’d forgotten all about it. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she’s dead and you keep asking questions, I wouldn’t have brought it to mind again.”

We got off the bus on Holland Park Avenue. The rain had almost stopped and I sensed that Carole wanted rid of me; there was something shameful about discussing the dead girl’s secrets only minutes after she was buried. I said I would take the train back to Euston Square, but I was sorry that we had to part; her honesty, her desire to do the right thing were endearing and I thought she would be a good friend, if only I could win her trust.

At the last moment, I asked her to have another look at the dancer. She seemed afraid to touch it but in the end held it in her bony fingers. “Isn’t it heavy? Did it cost a great deal? I shouldn’t fancy it in my home. My mum would have a fit.”

“I don’t know what it’s worth. I’m going to try and find out.”

“What use is it?”

“It looks nice, I suppose, that’s all.”

“Stella loved to dance, it’s true. But not like this, obviously . . .” Her pale eyes, as they met mine, were a little fearful. Then she thrust the statue back in my hand, her bus came, and she rode away.