The Crimson Rooms (36 page)

“It could be anything. A raffle ticket? A cloakroom ticket? Number 437. No, it’s slightly larger than a raffle ticket, wouldn’t you say? I’ve seen this type a good deal, Breen, haven’t you, among our clients, as issued by the police when they confiscate clothing or such. But our Stella didn’t have a criminal record, did she? And what about the stains on her clothes? What were they? Mud, blood? Do you suppose she had an accident or was lost, or was perhaps induced or forced to lie down in her clothes—is that what you’re thinking, Miss Gifford?”

For a moment we were silent as we pondered those murky eighteen hours between Stella leaving work and turning up late next day. Then Miss Drake spoke for the first time. “Of course,” she drawled, putting the tip of her pencil daintily to the middle of her bottom lip and pausing, to emphasize that she was doing us a favor by uttering a word, “she might have had a medical emergency, but of a very specific nature.”

“You mean she sought an abortion,” said Wolfe.

“Child murder,” said Miss Drake firmly.

Breen sighed. “It had crossed my mind, though one might have expected something to show up in the postmortem. And if it was the case that Stella was in some kind of desperate situation, would she not have told her friend at work? I thought you women talked about anything and everything.” But having looked from Miss Drake to me, he didn’t press the point—apparently he didn’t find that we were representative of our sex.

“Stella’s friend at Lyons did mention that the clothes smelled of hospitals,” I said.

“I could find out . . .” said Wolfe.

“I daresay you could,” said Breen, “but in the meantime, on the basis that it’s possible our poor victim had a medical emergency, I think Miss Gifford should visit our hospitals to see if she spent a night there. Miss Drake will find the name of her family doctor and speak to him. I may make a few inquiries among our female clients who might have a better idea than us where a girl might go. And Wolfe, get someone to check police records for the night Stella was missing, in case she ended up in custody. And now,” he added, nodding dismissively at Miss Drake and me, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Wolfe.”

An hour later, I was in Shoreditch Magistrates’ Court,
making licensing applications, this time before a bench of four lay magistrates, one of them a lady in a startling white hat. For once I found myself greeted smilingly by the bench, I suspect because the novelty of a female advocate broke the tedium of granting the Railway Arms an extension until eleven o’clock for a coming-of-age party; another, a week on Saturday, for an engagement. The magistrates pushed back their chairs and discussed each case sotto voce as if they were deciding guilt in a capital offense, and when granting the application did so with an air of sighing magnanimity.

Later, this time with Wolfe yawning on my left hand, supposedly to lend his support, I defended a landlord prosecuted under the Intoxicating Liquor Act. “A woman was responsible for the legislation in the first place, it’s surely fitting that you should take on the extra work it brings,” Breen had said, though he’d once told me he approved of the bill, describing it as one of the very few recently introduced onto our statute books that might enhance the quality of our lives.

The landlord’s defense, disclosed to me when he turned up five minutes before the hearing, was that it was ridiculous to expect him to ask every young customer his age before serving a pint, and that bloody (“Excuse me, miss”) woman MP hadn’t thought through the consequences. “Other land-lords manage it,” I told him. “I shall simply suggest to the court that it was an uncharacteristic lapse and that you have a clean record for this type of offense.” I did not add that with Lady Astor’s bill only months old it was to be hoped no landlord had accrued a record.

“By the way,” murmured Wolfe as we sat together under the dock while the magistrates retired to consider their verdict, “the Marchant case. Breen told me to look into it. Devilish hard to get the children out by legal means, I’d say. The Good Samaritan Home is notoriously evangelical. Takes a hard line on the sort of background those children come from. The chair of the board, Bishop Ogilvie, is teetotal. Can’t stand drink, can’t stand the fact that some children don’t have a father or attend church.”

“So what must we do?”

“We’ll need to pull strings, Miss Gifford. I doubt your Mrs. Marchant, from what I’ve heard, will be able to prove to the courts that she’s a fit mother. Homes like the Good Samaritan will argue that children should be severed from the vicious influence of home.”

“We have money. She will work.”

“Money isn’t enough. If the home’s taken against her, they will spy on her and inspect her to see if she has the moral rectitude to bring up the children.”

“And if she hasn’t, according to them?”

He shrugged. “Then the home will dispose of them as it sees fit.”

We sprang to our feet as the magistrates came back and fined my landlord ten shillings.

Afterward, still brooding on my conversation with Wolfe, I waited an hour and a half for the case of a young boy (one of Breen’s habitual clients) in the children’s court pleading guilty to stealing a pineapple. I so wanted to see Miss Buckley and the Good Samaritan Home subjected to the due process of law. It wasn’t just that Buckley and I had been locked in positions of violent antipathy for those few minutes in her office, it was that Leah had all the cards stacked against her: the home had money, influence, tradition, righteousness, religion on its side. Poor Leah had only love (and the home would even regard her type of love as dubious), Mrs. Sanders, and me.

Meanwhile, Wolfe, with characteristic ennui, represented a wife beater who was pleading innocence on the grounds of severe provocation (adjourned for trial), and defended successfully in the brief trial of the son of a fellow solicitor accused of dangerous conduct on a bicycle.

After the pineapple case (adjourned for the child’s mother to attend), I was at last free to go.

B
y the afternoon,
the weather had cleared, and I took the Metropolitan Line train to Chesham under a blue sky studded with puffy white clouds. Though I would not have admitted it to myself, I had made a concession to the fact that I was meeting Thorne by wearing a much lighter blouse than usual, with mother-of-pearl buttons and a slightly scooped neck, though, in view of the recent unsettled weather, my shoes were suitable for all seasons.

As the train rattled out of Wembley Park, I was conscious of a clearing of the mind that had nothing whatever to do with the sunshine. It was as if the tangle of home and work fell away and instead I was untrammeled as an arrow shot cleanly from its bow.

I had not experienced the world in such vivid colors since the July before James was killed, when he was on leave and we picnicked on Primrose Hill, lying on our backs afterward, elbow to elbow, hip to hip. When I turned my head, about to say, “We’ll buy an ice cream, shall we, on the way home?” I saw that a tear had trickled from the corner of his closed eye, down his cheek, and into his ear. I didn’t say a word. We got up a few minutes later and walked home. I never mentioned the ice cream.

It was as if all the years since then I had been semiconscious but now was abruptly wide-awake, with everything so present to me that I blinked in the sudden burst of color, sound, touch. Beyond the train window, tranquil farmland gushed past, greens and creams and browns, and within the compartment the smallest detail came into sharp focus, so that instead of filtering out the inconsequential I saw it all: a crumpled ticket, the ridges in the floor where cigarette butts, mud, and fluff were caught, a mole the size of a farthing on the cheek of a child opposite, the way his mother’s wedding ring cut into her swollen finger. A sane voice in my head repeated: You are a legal clerk accompanying a barrister on a tour of a murder scene. That is all. You are absurd to attach any other significance to the meeting. But that voice was drowned out by a roar of expectation.

In a terse telephone conversation with Thorne’s clerk, I had arranged to meet him behind the church. I had a map and a penciled plan of the terrain, together with a list of instructions from Wolfe:
Check timings; consider hat; how did Wheeler conceal weapon?
It was barely a ten-minute walk from the station, across the High Street, through a cluster of little cottages, and up the lane leading out of the town, where Thorne was waiting for me beside a natty Ford. He leaned on the churchyard wall and wore a summer-weight suit and beautiful shoes, highly polished, with stitching across the toe and narrow, neat laces. His trilby was perched on the wall beside him and his hair had flopped onto his brow. When he saw me, he gave a start, as if of surprise, and raised an eyebrow. I walked up briskly and put out my gloved hand, registering that both his pose and his reaction to my arrival had been staged and that he was possibly nearly as nervous as I.

“Very good of you, Miss Gifford, to give up so much of your valuable time.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to remind him that I had no choice in the matter but I was determined not to quarrel. In fact, my plan, upon which I had dwelled at length during the small hours of three successive nights, was that he should find my company so dull that he would want nothing more to do with me. If I didn’t see him again, I reasoned, my wounded heart would begin to heal. So we set off in silence along the path running under the churchyard wall and through the gate into the field.

At first, my strategy worked. I told myself that he was just a man, after all, product of a good private school, the type I had known at Cambridge only perhaps more able and ambitious than most. Well, I had nothing to fear. What was all the fuss about? In fact, when I glanced at him, I told myself: he is too tall to be truly desirable and you know him to be as ambitious and as guilty of chauvinism as the rest—I wonder you ever found him attractive. Sylvia, the socialite, is welcome to him.

“No ill effects from the art party, Miss Gifford?” he said at last.

“None. You?”

“Oh good Lord, no. But then I didn’t take a dousing in the river. And Sylvia keeps a weather eye on my drinking, if that’s what you meant. I’m never allowed to knock back so much that I can’t drive her home.”

“I thought your fiancée very beautiful.”

“She is. Sometimes I forget how beautiful, so that when I see her after an absence I’m quite taken aback.”

I nearly laughed aloud. Until that moment, my treacherous heart had allowed the hope to flicker that Thorne had engineered this trip because, despite his engagement, he was as interested in me as I in him. The flame was extinguished by his devotion to Sylvia—expressed abstractedly, as if he was actually immersed, for that moment, in her loveliness—and it served me right. Well, I knew how to encourage men to talk about their heart’s desire; I had learned the trick at my mother’s knee. “Have you been engaged long?”

“Rather too long. I’ve known her for years, since she was a bouncy little girl. I was at school with her brother, Donald. He and I were best friends. I used to spend weeks of my holidays in and out of the Hardynge house in Belsize Park.” I pictured those favored children, several rungs above my own family on the social ladder, flitting from one pleasure to the next, tennis, cricket, cycling, theater, dancing. “My own home was much humbler,” he added, “my father is a solicitor in Reading but the Hardynges welcomed me nonetheless. And when I got back from the war I found that Sylvia had become this astonishing young woman. How could I not ask her to marry me?”

I congratulated myself on dealing with the subject of his fiancée with generosity and detachment, although I could not help dwelling on the strangeness of his last question. Nonetheless, the exchange, in which Thorne had disclosed so much and I so little, had given me the upper hand. “According to the police,” I said, consulting my notes, “this is the path taken by the Wheelers, no question. A witness has come forward, a farmer’s daughter who passed them here, on the brow of the hill, about midday. She gave a very detailed description of Stella’s pink dress and hat.”