A Spider in the Cup (Joe Sandilands Investigation) (22 page)

Joe’s brother-in-law was a respected and effective Justice of the Peace in his county and his own land tended to be given a wide berth by the local villains. These—such as they were—were well known to him and to the men he employed.

“They like to know what’s going on. I shall tell them we’re protecting an agent of Uncle Sam from a German death squad.”

“That should do it,” Joe said.

Marcus hurried out to plan a day that, for him, was shaping up splendidly.

Lydia came round the table and pulled up a chair close to Joe. “Joe, before we get started, I think you’d better tell me a little about our guest—Uncle Sam’s agent. You smiled when Marcus said that. One of your annoying smiles. Is that what he is? I like to know these things. How did you ‘break his cover’—isn’t that what your Intelligence friends say? How did you catch him out?”

“He was caught playing Nine Men’s Morris.” Joe enjoyed Lydia’s disbelieving expression before going on carefully: “My best Branchman observed him playing with a selection of questionable characters in surprising circumstances. In conditions of some secrecy … In fact, there’s something you can do for me to lure our mysterious guest out into the light, perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind …”

Lydia listened carefully to his explanation and his suggestion and nodded. “No problem there. I’ll make sure the right moment offers itself. But I can tell you, Joe, that’s no questionable character even though he plays games with them. He’s troubled, one can see that, but I’d say he’s as honest as he looks. I shall be very surprised if he cheats. But for now—I see you’ve brought your work down.” She kicked a foot at the briefcase he’d slipped under the table. “Shall I take a look at your notes with you? I’d especially like to see the pathologist’s report on the girl buried under Thames mud, poor chick.”

“I haven’t had a moment to see them myself, Lyd.”

“Then we’ll go through them together. No Dorcas at home at the moment—you’ll have to settle for
my
female insights.”

Joe didn’t even pretend to demur. His sister was as silent as the grave when it came to his professional cases and, with her wide experience, had more than once set him on the right road to the solution of a problem. He helped her clear a space at the table and took out his files.

“R
IPPON WRITES WELL
,
doesn’t he?”

Joe knew Lydia was saying something—anything—deliberately free of emotion to cover her distress at the content of the stylishly expressed account of the horrors of the pathology.

“I take it you made sense of all that medical vocabulary?” Joe asked tentatively. Like many women in the southern counties, his sister had served as an auxiliary nurse in wartime and for years after had worked as a volunteer at the local hospital. Mother of two daughters, suffragette and an outspoken woman of the world, she was very free with her opinions. He prepared to hear them delivered—shot out through both barrels, more like—as a result of reading Rippon’s report.

“Yes, I did. Ask me for an interpretation if you’re struggling.”

“The preliminaries are perfectly straightforward. Most of these observations I’ve made myself, peering over the doctor’s shoulder. No clues to identity other than her dancing practice clothes and her general physique. Though if Orford can find a ballet company that served its girls shepherd’s pie and rice pudding on Tuesday, we should be getting close. Sounds a bit banal and institutional. No one had treated her to a last meal at the Ritz.”

“No. Sounds more like school dinners or hospital food. And at odds with that quite extraordinary parting gift of a gold coin. Now that’s lavish! More than I’ll get when I go. Anything more on that?”

“The fingerprinting is still being worked on. But I’m not hoping for much. Two sets of prints from the two men who handled it at the scene is all I can expect.”

“The food was well on its way through channels, apparently. Contents barely distinguishable. She died some hours after eating. That speaks for the use of a general anaesthetic,” Lydia
commented. “You aren’t allowed food for a few hours before. And if the doc’s got it right about the cause of death—bet he has!—she certainly didn’t die exercising at the barre! She must have been re-clothed in this outfit subsequently. Why?”

“They had to dress her in something for burial and this strongly indicates
ballet dancer
. Kingstone got it right—she was meant to be a stand-in for the real star of the show. Natalia. And I think she was meant to be found. The perpetrator’s no Jack the Ripper, carving up the nearest woman at random when the urge strikes. You have to try to understand that whoever’s running this … torture chamber of the mind”—Joe snorted with distaste—“fancies himself some dark, manipulative choreographer with a sadistic streak and a contempt for women.”

“There—you’ve solved it! I can think of five choreographers answering that description at large in London at the moment,” Lydia commented. “I should have them all arrested. So our girl, our dead girl, is a
coryphée
or a
sujet
, more like—a second-string soloist who’s been pushed on stage to dance the prima ballerina’s role in ‘The Dying Swan’? Her last performance. But in real life—or death rather—not on stage. Surely there’s a simpler explanation? It’s a bit mad, Joe.”

“It is. But
calculatedly
mad. We’re dealing with a mind-poisoner slithering about in the wings of a stage set, decreeing entrances and exits. But then, when you read the details of how she died, suddenly, the thing takes on the brutal and bloody reality of an abattoir.”

“I wonder if a man less skilled and thorough than Rippon would have missed it?”

“I’m certain of that. No visible injuries apart from one needle injection which could easily have been missed. Some opiate, he’s thinking. A preliminary for what was to come. She was definitely drugged, probably anaesthetised. She may not have suffered. The toe will have been cut off after her death at least.”

“And Cornelius received it in a chocolate box with a quotation? Nasty, but a big toe fades in significance when you think of her primary—her lethal—injury. Shall we stop ducking and weaving and put it on the table? This girl died as a result of incompetent surgery during an abortion. What does Rippon say?… ‘Massive intrauterine haemorrhage suffered in the course of a surgical termination of pregnancy.’ She bled to death. Backstreet abortionist, are we thinking?”

“No. It’s all in the wording. Rippon wouldn’t have said ‘surgical’ in that case. He’d have said, ‘criminal, unsafe abortion’ … something like that.”

Lydia made a noise of a hissing kettle, got up and began to walk around the room clattering dishes. “I’m sure I put my gaspers down somewhere. Ah, there they are.” She lit a Players and came back to the table, her equanimity not entirely restored. Joe kept silent, watching her puff angrily. She had been working for years in what they had to call, delicately, a women’s advisory bureau and had had more distress and pain poured into her ear than he wanted to imagine.

“ ‘Dilatation and curettage,’ they call it. Huh! As though a touch of Latin dignifies the process! ‘Opening up and scraping out,’ they mean. Last year in this so-called civilised country of ours, Joe, there were nearly thirty thousand live births. And ten thousand abortions. One in four babies destroyed by—at best—a surgeon’s scalpel. And the scalpel’s just for the rich! A hundred pounds a time, I understand, is the going rate. At worst, and for the vast majority of victims, you can expect a germ-infected knitting needle on a filthy kitchen table. It has to be stopped at the highest level. The pregnancies must be avoided in the first place and the means to do that made generally available at the local chemist to all who want them.”

Joe was familiar with and sympathetic to his sister’s radical thoughts but on hearing them delivered with such uncompromising
zeal he was always reduced to a state of anxiety. In some quarters they would have been regarded as heretical and subversive. Her name would have been entered on a list. It was probably there already.

Seeing Joe’s stricken face, Lydia stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer, sniffed defiance and collected herself. “Too shrill? Sorry, Joe. On my high horse again. You’re going to tell me to save it for the soapbox at Speaker’s Corner.”

“No, I’m not. It’s sickening, I agree. But I’ll tell you something—our poor girl, whoever she may be, is not a victim of
murder
at least. Manslaughter at the most? It may be reduced to ‘professional misconduct.’ ”

“But if—as you seem to be implying—there are degrees of death these days, you
do
have a first class, undeniable murder on your books. Your sailor witness may not have quite the same glamour as your dancer but he didn’t break his own neck.”

“I hadn’t forgotten him. I won’t let myself be mesmerised by the alluring light of a ballerina’s corpse-candle. Strange, isn’t it, Lyd? You always think of ballerinas as virginal. Young things barely into puberty. Dressed up in diaphanous costumes and dedicated to a life of dance, the only men in their lives the one or two gorgeous—but probably unattainable—Prince Charmings who lift them about the stage. Hard to think of them marrying, let alone conducting clandestine affairs.”

“They do marry quite frequently. And they usually choose someone solidly respectable—a member of parliament, a banker, someone in the city, or a minor royal personage. Lydia Lopokova married her distinguished economist some years ago and became Mrs. John Maynard Keynes.”

“But until that happy day, I suppose, when I think about it, there must be a succession of upper-class stage-door johnnies. I dare say the girls have to run the gauntlet of drunken old fools who gather about the back door of Covent Garden.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’d be seen performing such antics, Joe.
Discreet notes are sent with extravagant bouquets of red roses. These girls are regarded in some circles as easy pickings, I’m afraid. There was a story about it in my dancing days that at the Mariinsky theatre in St. Petersburg—before the war and the revolution and all that—there was a secret passage leading from the royal box down to the back of the theatre giving direct access to the performers. If some dashing grand duke took a fancy to the latest girl in the chorus line, he could pass a note down and make his exit unobserved by the audience. They could be off in a closed carriage before she’d scrambled out of her tutu.”

“Good God!”

“We all thought it very romantic, in our innocence. We gawped at photographs of Mathilde Kschessinska, flaunting her lavish jewellery. Romanov gifts. She even wore them on stage—had them sewn into her costumes. She was mistress to at least two Grand Dukes and the Emperor Nicholas himself. And she no more than a Mariinsky pupil, a ballet dancer like us. Perhaps one day, we would dance our way into the heart of a prince? Now I see it for what it is. Though some of the girls are canny enough to understand the system and play it to their advantage. Mademoiselle Kschessinska became ‘Her Serene Highness Princess Romanov-Krasinskya’ after the war and lives in splendour in the south of France.”

Joe didn’t like to hear the longing and envy in her voice and replied crisply, “I’m glad you grew too tall, Lydia, and evaded the traps. It’s criminal exploitation of minors in my book. I’d like to know how common it is.”

“It happens more frequently than anyone guesses. And some of the exploiters are nearer home—the professional men who surround them: musicians, composers, choreographers, ballet coaches. Not all their admirers are rich. The girls, if they’re unimportant and unsupported and make a bad choice, just fall out of view and into the gutter. The grander ones with names, reputations and jewels to
lose ‘throw a tantrum,’ or have a ‘difference of opinion’ with the ballet master and walk out for a few days. Sometimes they suffer from ‘mental and physical exhaustion’ and retire to the country for a month or two. Have you noticed how frequently that scenario is played out for the public?”

“And the public, like me, naively put it down to the artistic temperament. And grumble quietly when an understudy is shoved on stage at the last minute. Good Lord! They must be available everywhere, these places?”

“Most of the world’s great capitals can offer the facilities. And the discretion. At a price.”

“You’d know where these establishments were to be found in London, Lyd?”

“I’d start looking in Harley Street. Rich women are attracted by a grand address and reputation whatever their state of distress. Of course, they won’t advertise themselves openly. The birth control clinic I help to run would never be able to function under that description—we have to call it a ‘Women’s Advisory Bureau.’ Inevitably, we get the occasional girl coming in to ask about office work and typing lessons. You’d have to look for something general, reassuring and yet clinical on their letter heading. And their invoices.”

“How about St. Catherine’s Clinic, Feminine Hygiene. Diagnostic, Surgical and Speciality Care by highly qualified physicians?” He read from his notebook the words Armitage had noted down.

“Oh, yes! May I look?… Yes, I’d say that leaves no room for doubt for those with eyes to see. But—imagine a husband presented with a bill from such an establishment. He’s going to pay up at once with no questions asked. Too embarrassing. He’ll argue about the price of an Ascot hat but his good lady’s internal plumbing system? The less known, the better. And it doesn’t exactly invite a raid by The Plod, does it?”