A Spider in the Cup (Joe Sandilands Investigation) (26 page)

“You didn’t …?” Lydia feared to hear his answer.

“One of them made a very clever move. He held out a sausage right under my nose. One of those spicy German things. It was still hot. They’d been cooking them for breakfast.” His eyes clouded with memory. “With nothing but beechnuts in my belly for four days—I took a bite. And then another. I offered them my American cigarettes. We shook hands and I took them all prisoner. But the darnedest thing …” He hesitated. “And I’m not the only one this has happened to. My watch—this one—stopped ticking right at the moment we charged. It marks the moment I ought to have died: ten
A.M
.—there where you see it now. I keep it with me always as a reminder of the last hour. Of the way things could have gone.”

“You’ve never tried to rewind it?” Lydia ventured. “They’re very reliable, those watches. It probably just ran down.”

“No, I haven’t. But I’m thinking maybe now I should. Put my life back where it was—on the line. Replay those last sixty minutes? Time owed?”

Lydia lunged at the watch and moved it down the table out of his reach. “No one starts a war in Surrey, Mr. Kingstone. Not even if we have the beechwoods for it. Joe must go out and speak to these people. I’ll go with you, Joe. Not Marcus, he’ll start slapping faces and demanding satisfaction.”

Kingstone turned to Joe. “I used to find it easy to judge our commanding officer harshly—Black Jack Pershing. Excellent soldier, as most agree, but not a man noted for his diplomacy. He never knew when to keep his views to himself. In a continent exhausted by four years of war and longing for it to be over, he came out against agreeing to an Armistice. And he sounded off to the Supreme War Council, no less, in a letter. By going ahead with a negotiated peace, he told them, instead of holding out for unconditional surrender, the Allies were giving up the chance of a lasting world peace and running the risk of future German aggression.”

Joe nodded, remembering. “He wasn’t the only one to think that the sight of soldiers returning as heroes still carrying their arms might give the wrong impression in their homeland. If you send them back as prisoners of war—well, it’s brutal but you do quench the last spark of resistance. That was the theory in those days of uncertainty.”

“Like many, I thought Pershing’s position hawkish and pitiless at the time. Now, Sandilands, I’m not so sure.” Kingstone added, uncomfortably, “I think we left a tap root alive and growing in the soil.”

He reached defiantly for the watch and began to wind it. The battered old timepiece came to life at once. The ticks, loud, instant
and full of the brassy confidence of a bygone age, reverberated unnervingly in the silence. The blue hands began to move.

Good Lord! The man had been winding himself up as well as his wretched timepiece, Joe realised, and was glad to see Kingstone slip it out of sight back into the pocket of his borrowed flannels. He’d needed that moment but he was ready to go now. The senator’s features, already bold, were enlivened by a glow of confidence, strengthened by quiet resolve, sobered by a notion of duty. A face to follow up a hill, into the jaws of death. Marcus dropped a kiss on his wife’s head, to her evident surprise, and murmured: “Confine yourself and the other women to the kitchen, my dear, and do not attempt to respond to any shots you may hear. Guns all over the place, don’t you know.”

Joe got to his feet. This was turning into a pantomime flourish of thigh-slapping derring-do. Chapter four in a
Boys’ Own Paper
story. The thought of three shotguns, two rifles and at least three revolvers in the hands of eight men who’d never been introduced, being loosed off in the confines of a wooded valley made his blood run cold. Time to knock the board over again.

“Stop right there!” he commanded. “Marcus—go and make your deviation arrangements with the local Plod by all means—we can use every spare minute. While you’re at it, book two places in the cells then get back here and I’ll tell you what we’re really going to do. Oh, and tell Pearson I need to have a word with him.”

“W
ell, well! Why am I not surprised to hear that?” Inspector Orford purred into the telephone. He looked with satisfaction at the registration number on his pad and wrote down the address he’d just been given. “Ta, Daisy, love! Can you send me written confirmation of that?”

His triumph was swiftly modified by a look of concern. Better safe than sorry. Guessing what Sandilands would have done next, he picked up the phone again. “Get me Companies House, miss … Oh, good morning. Scotland Yard here. We need some information on the owners and directors of a London firm—could you oblige …?”

Startled at what he’d uncovered, the inspector asked for a repetition of the names he’d just been given. On a second hearing, the names were just as alarming. Two of the names were known to him. Shell burst, that! Among the “untouchables” of society. A third was a foreigner whose face he’d seen in the papers last week. He began to see why the Assistant Commissioner had been breathing down his neck on this one. He was only surprised they hadn’t called in the Household Cavalry. Ants’ nest!

Orford thought for a bit. He was going in, one way or another. There was only one way to attack an ants’ nest and that was with a very long stick.

As he bustled out of the inspectors’ room to pick up a sergeant and start his poking, a messenger arrived with a chit from the front desk. He read it swiftly. An update on the missing girls of London. Front desk had been very good about sending him the latest. Here was a note of yet another loved one whose absence had only just been noticed after five days. This one made him whistle between his teeth. Marie Destaines, aged twenty-two, five foot two, dark hair and eyes. Reported missing by her granny. A Mrs. Clarke from Stepney had been expecting a visit yesterday but the girl had not turned up. She’d last paid a visit the previous Monday night when she’d stayed over, saying she’d be back the following Friday. Worried granny requested a visit from an important policeman who could investigate a delicate matter and enquire into the girl’s present whereabouts. Orford tucked the sheet into his pocket.

“No reply. I’ll deal with this personally,” he told the messenger.

He rustled up a detective sergeant he knew to be a bright lad and on the ball and asked him to parade for duty with briefcase, clipboard and dirty macintosh in ten minutes time.

“I’ll brief you in the taxi on our way there,” he told Sergeant Dobson, having inspected his appearance and found him perfectly acceptable. “Ever been to Harley Street? Nor have I. We’re backdoor trade today, I’m afraid. We’ll be starting and finishing in the kitchens, which is the best we can do for two blokes with no warrant and no clout. A surprise visit from the Public Health Department inspectors is just about the only excuse you can come up with for getting into these places unannounced. I keep two official passes at the ready. Funny that—say you’re from the Yard and folk slam the door in your face. Say you’ve been sent to inspect their U-bends and they fling it open and put the kettle on. There’s your badge. You’re Officer (Second Class) Albert Fish today.”

Officer Fish put on a good show, Orford reckoned. Clipboard at the ready, smell-of-gas face on, he’d distracted the kitchen staff
with a series of penetrating questions and demands to check for himself the state of their ovens and their drains. While he was so occupied, Orford had cruised about the kitchens looking inscrutable. He’d asked the cook to supply him with a copy of the menus prepared for the patients over the last week. He checked from Sunday through to Thursday but came up with little more substantial than ham salad and tinned fruit. Jokily, he pulled a face at the cook. “Cor! This lot isn’t likely to test your culinary skills, madam! Don’t they ever let you cook something a chap could get his teeth into—a nice roast? Shepherd’s pie?”

The cook laughed. “You’ve forgotten where you are! All ladies here. And mostly on diets. Only healthy food on offer.”

“I suppose that makes sense. I shall enter … ‘diet varied, delicate and appropriate to consumers,’ shall I?”

“W
ELL, THAT DIDN’T
get us very far in any direction. Up and down the U-bend and back where we started.” The sergeant was disappointed not to be hauling someone off in cuffs.

“There’s times, laddie, when a nil return is just as significant as a positive. This is one of them. We drew a blank there for the pie. Eliminated. Wherever our dead girl had her last meal it wasn’t in that chop shop. It all goes to build a case. That Sandilands will know what to do with the results. We’re here to do the steady police work that puts the building blocks in his hands. Next up—a grieving gran. Take your raincoat off and put on a sympathetic smile. We’re off to Stepney.”

They were welcomed into the small terraced house and put to sit in the parlour while Mrs. Clarke went off to make a cup of tea. As soon as they heard the tap running, Orford was on his feet examining the row of silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece. He picked up one and silently showed it to the sergeant who pulled a face and nodded gravely.

Mrs. Clarke revealed her anxiety by her strained chatter.
When they had settled to their tea, she offered them the photograph Orford had just noted. “This is Marie. Doesn’t do her justice. She has lovely rich dark hair and brown eyes. Gets those from her father.
French
,” she confided. “Went home to join up with the French army in nineteen fourteen when Marie was three. Never seen hide nor hair of him since. I brought the child up while her mother went out to work. When we discovered she had a talent for dancing I sold the house next door—these two were both left to me by my father—and I invested the cash in her career. It’s not cheap. All those lessons and all the dresses. She didn’t let us down. She did well. So well I hardly saw her for years at a time. Always touring abroad. Her mother died five years ago but she’d have been proud … Whenever Marie is back in London, she always stays with me, not in the digs the company provided.”

“Which company is she appearing with, Mrs. Clarke?”

“The Covent Garden lot. They start at the end of the month. She’s in rehearsals at the moment.” Her face clouded and she hesitated before continuing. “Well, she
was
in rehearsals. She left.”

“Left? Just like that? When was this?”

“Monday. She had a row with the man in charge. She was always having rows with someone in the company—it’s part of the life. But this time I think it was serious. She resigned. Walked out.”

“So the company wouldn’t have realised she’d gone missing? They wouldn’t have raised the alarm. As far as they were concerned, she’d packed her bags and left.”

“That’s right.” She hesitated. “She
told
me she’d left but … I don’t know … she may have been sacked. I suppose they’d have to, really, wouldn’t they … in the circumstances?” She fell silent and fiddled with her teacup.

In his most tactful rumble, Orford asked: “Do you feel up to telling us about these circumstances? Don’t fret … we’ve heard it all before, love.”

“She’d had a bit of a slip-up. I don’t know with who—she didn’t breathe a word. I think it must have been someone quite high up because the someone was paying the bills. Marie never asked me for a penny towards it and I know how much it costs. She was booked in at a swish little place, she said. ‘It will only be for four days, Gran,’ she told me. ‘I’ll be back and dancing again by Friday. See you then! Don’t worry! It happens to all the girls at some time or another.’ But how can I not worry? Something’s gone wrong. I’m sure of it. She never broke her word to me in twenty-two years. If she’s lying ill somewhere I want to know about it and fetch her home.”

The tears could be kept back no longer. The inspector hurried to produce a large crisp handkerchief and handed it over with a gentle, “Here you are, Missis. You’re very welcome. I always carry a spare.”

As she sniffed and gulped he remarked quietly: “She’ll be missing her gran’s home cooking, I expect.”

Mrs. Clarke looked up and managed a watery smile. “She ate like a bird most of the time. But she always tucked into her favourites when she got back home. At least she had a good meal in her when she went off on Tuesday. She had shepherd’s pie and rice pudding for her dinner. Well, lunch they call it these days.”

“That would be Tuesday, then. Midday. Look, may I take this photograph away with us?” Orford asked. “More enquiries to make but I guarantee I’ll get back to see you by tomorrow morning at the latest.”

As they walked back to the bus stop, the sergeant asked, “Why didn’t you tell her there and then? You knew, didn’t you, that it was Marie lying dead in the police morgue?”

“I did. But I have to do this by the book and check it out with Doc Rippon or Sandilands. Death is something you have to be one hundred percent certain about. But I’ll make sure I’m the one who breaks the bad news as soon as we have it confirmed. There’s
never a good way to do that but I always think it comes more easily from someone you’ve shared a pot of tea with, Sarge.”

“However do you find the right words?”

“Not sure I ever do. I can never remember them afterwards. I certainly don’t trot out any prepared phrases—they deserve better than that. I know if any stranger oozed up to me ‘offering condolences’ and claiming to ‘understand my grief’ I’d poke him in the eye. But they always seem to know anyhow. Like that old lady—she knows. It’s the noises you make that matter—no one needs a fancy vocabulary to be death’s mouthpiece.”

T
he Riley slid over into a passing place and skulked unseen, shaded by the low-hanging boughs of a larch tree with which it blended perfectly. The driver tipped the peak of his grey tweed cap down over his forehead, funnelling his gaze directly at the Maybach Zeppellin yards ahead of him on the road. He found the packet of Woodbines he’d bought in Chelsea. They’d somehow seemed appropriate to the old banger he was driving. The ashtray was full of stinking old stubs. The owner, whoever he was, must be wheezing like a squeeze box. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Just a local man who’d pulled over to have a quiet smoke in a lay-by, if anyone was asking. He puffed twice and chucked it out of the car window in disgust.