An Expert in Murder (3 page)

Greeting Lydia with a hug, Josephine introduced the girl as a friend she had met on the journey down. The actress, always gracious when faced with her public, went through the routine of 13

conversation and autographs that had become second nature to her, whilst managing to make Elspeth feel that she was the first person ever to mention the poignancy of the death scene. After a politely timed exchange of charm and admiration, she remembered Marta and the waiting taxi. ‘Come on, we must get you safely to that madhouse you’re staying in,’ she said to Josephine.

‘I’m sure you could do with a rest after such a long day, and I need to be at the theatre on time or Johnny will be a bag of nerves throughout the entire first act. You’d think he’d be used to it by now.’ She flashed a winning smile at Elspeth, and picked up Josephine’s travelling case. ‘Is the rest of your luggage being sent on?’ she asked.

At the mention of luggage, a look of panic crossed Elspeth’s face. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she cried. ‘After all that fuss, I’ve left my bag on the train. I must go back and get it, then I’d better find my uncle. My mother’s entire new range is in there,’ she explained, gesturing towards the mountain of hat boxes that an unlucky porter had felt obliged to transfer from the luggage car to a platform trolley, ‘and she’ll kill us if we don’t get it safely delivered to Lillibet’s.’ Hugging Josephine tightly and promising to look her up at the theatre, Elspeth vanished back into the carriage from which she had so thoroughly emerged, too concerned about her bag to notice that the feather had become dislodged from her hat and now lay on the platform floor. Josephine bent down to pick it up.

‘Keep it – it’ll suit you,’ teased Lydia, looking half-admiringly, half-sympathetically at her friend. ‘You really do have the patience of Job. I don’t know anyone else who could spend a day with all that enthusiasm and still look sane at the end of it.’

Josephine smiled. ‘Much to my surprise, it’s been a pleasure. I must give it back to her, though,’ she said, turning towards the train.’ She’d be so sad not to have it when she meets her young man.’

Lydia caught her arm. ‘We really must go, Josephine – I can’t be late. Give it to her when she comes to see you at the theatre. My guess is that it won’t be long.’

14

Josephine hesitated. ‘No, you’re right. I’ll probably see her tomorrow. Let’s go and find Marta – I’m dying to meet her.’

‘Yes, and you can tell me whether this novel that she’s writing is any good or not. She’s far too divine for me to have any way of telling. She could jot down the shipping forecast and I’d think it was pure Daviot!’ Laughing, the two women walked out into the street, too engrossed in their conversation to notice the figure now moving towards the train.

Back on board, Elspeth saw with relief that her bag was still on the floor where she had left it. The train seemed almost deserted, the only noise coming from further down the car where staff were presumably preparing for the next journey. Looking down at the magazine, which now held two precious signatures, she smiled to herself and placed it carefully in the bag’s side pocket, thinking with excitement of the pleasure she would get from watching the next performance now that she knew two of the people involved.

As she buttoned the pocket securely and made sure this time that the rest of the bag was fastened, she heard a noise at the door behind her. Turning to explain to the guard that she had forgotten something and was just about to leave, she stared with recognition, then confusion, at a face which she had not expected to see on the train. Instinctively, before she had a chance to consider the strangeness of the moment, she took the gift that was held out to her with a smile and looked down at the doll in her hands, a souvenir of her beloved play and something she had longed to own.

When her companion took the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from its hook and hung it outside the door, then stepped quickly over to the window to pull down the blind, Elspeth opened her mouth to protest, but the words were too slow to save her.

An arm reached out towards her, drawing her into a deadly embrace which seemed to mock the physical affection she had so recently come to know. There was no time to scream. The hand that gripped the back of her neck, holding her close, was swift and sure, and by now no strength was needed. Surprise had given way to a paralysing horror and she had no more control over her limbs 15

than the doll which fell to the floor and lay staring upwards, an indifferent witness to her final moments. She tried to breathe normally, to stay calm, but her face was pressed into her assailant’s chest and panic welled up in her as she realised that this must surely be death. Please God, no, she thought, not now, not when I’m so happy.

When the lethal point punctured her skin, she felt nothing more than a sharp blow beneath her ribs but there was no chance to be thankful for the lack of pain, nor to wonder that her body should surrender itself with so little ceremony. In that briefest of moments, somewhere between waking and oblivion, between life and death, she was aware of all she would miss but the longing was soon over, replaced as she fell to her knees by a lasting, if pre-mature, peace.

16

Two

Detective Inspector Archie Penrose could never travel in the King’s Cross area without feeling instantly depressed. North London was the city at its most forbidding and, despite the widening of the streets, its most claustrophobic. He drove down an uninspiring thoroughfare bordered with drab houses, few of which had ever been decorated or even cleaned, and past the straggling shabbiness of Euston Station. Then there was King’s Cross itself; he always thought that the station’s facade – two main arches separated by a clock tower of dreadful yellow brick, turned black with the dirt of ages – looked more like the entrance to a gaol than the gateway to a capital. Certainly it did nothing to help a man on his way to a murder investigation.

A sizeable crowd had gathered at the head of Platform Eight, obscuring his view of the train in which the girl’s body had been discovered less than an hour ago by a young railway employee.

According to Penrose’s colleague, Sergeant Fallowfield, the boy was now in a state of shock. Fallowfield, who had been handling an incident round the corner in Judd Street when the call came in and was first on the scene, approached him now, pushing his way through the on-lookers with very little patience for their ghoulish curiosity.

‘You’d think they’d have something better to do on a Friday night, wouldn’t you, Sir? Bloody vultures, the lot of ’em.’

The comment was uncharacteristic of his sergeant, who usually had a more positive view of human nature despite years of experience to the contrary. Whatever he had seen on the train had clearly got to him. ‘Poor kid, she can’t be more than twenty,’ Fallowfield 17

said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Hardly had a chance to start her life, let alone live it.’

‘Do we know who she is?’ Penrose asked.

‘Assuming it’s her bag in the carriage, her name’s Elspeth Simmons and she’s from Berwick-on-Tweed – at least, that’s where she got on the train, and it’s a return ticket. It’s a nasty one, this, Sir – as spiteful as anything I’ve seen. I reckon we’ve got a sick bastard on our hands.’

When he saw what awaited him in the sealed-off carriage, Penrose could only agree. The dead girl sat – or rather seemed to have been composed – on the middle of the three seats to the right of the compartment, an ornate and deadly hatpin protruding from under her breastbone. Her hands had been clasped together in front of her in a mockery of applause at the scene which someone had created for her benefit in the vacant space opposite. There, a pair of dolls – one male and one female – had been carefully arranged on the seat like actors on a stage. They stood together in a half embrace, and he noticed that the woman’s left hand – the one that bore her wedding ring – had been broken off and lay on its own in front of the couple like a sinister prop from a horror film. Close to them on the seat was a hand-written note on expensive-looking paper: ‘Lilies are more fashionable,’ it said, but the flower that lay on the floor was not a lily but an iris.

It was immediately obvious to him that this was not a random or spontaneous killing but a carefully thought-out, and probably deeply personal, act of violence. Not for a second did he think that the murderer wished to be quickly identified, but there could be little doubt that a message could be traced in every object that he – or she – had been so careful to leave on and around the body.

It was a crime that had required considerable nerve.

‘Were the blinds up or down when she was found?’ he asked.

‘Both down, Sir. The boy says he pulled that one up as soon as he came in.’

Even so, Penrose thought, the scene must have taken a few minutes to arrange once the murder had been committed, and that would mean a greater risk of discovery than most people could 18

countenance. That was the point, though: in a symbolic killing such as this, they were not dealing with the fears and doubts of a normal person but with the arrogance and sense of invulnerability that invariably accompanied evil.

‘And is this exactly how she was found?’

‘Yes, or so he says. Forrester’s his name and he’s obviously frightened out of his wits. Maybrick’s had the waiting room cleared and taken him there with a cup of tea. Poor little sod – I’m not surprised he’s scared: I wouldn’t have liked to walk in on something like this at his age. Those dolls are enough to put the wind up anybody, and they gave him a right start – as much as finding the body.’

Penrose turned to look at them. The dolls were each about a foot high and elaborately clothed in fringed cloaks and old-fashioned head-dresses. Intrigued, he moved slightly closer, marvelling at the detail with which the faces had been modelled, appearing perversely life-like in a place of death. ‘They’re not just any dolls, Bill. I wonder if they were hers or if the killer brought them? They’re souvenirs from a play that’s on in the West End at the moment –
Richard of
Bordeaux
; it’s a historical piece about Richard II. Those dolls have been made specially to look like the characters in it. And that piece of paper,’ he continued, pointing to the note on the seat, ‘that’s a quotation from it: “Lilies are more fashionable.” I think it’s the Queen who says it at some point.’

Fallowfield had never heard of the play, but it came as no surprise to him that his superior should know all about it. Apart from policing, theatre was Penrose’s great passion and he had an exhaustive knowledge of the subject as well as a few friends and relatives in the business. ‘I just thought the note was a funny sort of love letter,’ Fallowfield said.

‘I suppose in a way it is,’ Penrose replied. ‘The question is –

who’s it from? And is the sender going to be devastated when we break the news that Miss Simmons is dead?’

‘Or does he know already, you mean?’ Fallowfield finished the line of thought. ‘Bit of an obvious calling card, that, don’t you think, Sir? I mean, we’re going to find out if she was courting and 19

if it really is a boyfriend who did it, he might as well have left his address and saved us some time.’

‘Yes, I suppose so, but I don’t think for a minute it’s going to be as simple as all that. For a start, we’ve no guarantee that it is a love letter and, judging by everything else that’s been put here for a reason, I’d say there’s a much deeper meaning than some kind of clumsy romantic gesture. And apart from all this extra paraphernalia, don’t you think that hatpin’s an odd sort of weapon to choose? Not a very masculine sort of killing. It’s straight out of Agatha Christie:
Murder on the Royal Highlander
in fifteen easy chapters.’

‘Perhaps they all did it then, Sir. And there’s only nine chapters, by the way,’ Fallowfield said with unconscious irony, betraying an
au fait
-ness with current detective fiction that always surprised Penrose. He suddenly had an image of his down-to-earth sergeant rushing home from the Yard every night to devour the latest thriller by his fireside. Better still, perhaps he was actually writing one of his own. The thought of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers turning out to be a portly, moustached officer of the law in his early fifties was priceless, and he made a mental note to mention it to Josephine when he saw her tomorrow night.

Except now, of course, he would have to see her earlier than planned and there would be no joy in the meeting. For whatever reason, this girl’s murder was linked to her play and, no matter how innocent the explanation, he could not conceal that fact from her and neither would she want him to. He wished he could dilute the shock by promising the sort of tidy solution with which she had concluded her first detective story, but he couldn’t insult her intelligence in that way and wouldn’t get away with it if he tried.

He might long for the sort of luck that his fictional counterpart, Inspector Alan Grant, had enjoyed on his debut outing, but he and Josephine both knew that the reality of death was different, that murder brought with it a contagious messiness, a stain of grief, horror and disruption which refused to be contained within the pages of a novel.

He realised with embarrassment that Fallowfield had continued 20

the conversation beyond his erudite knowledge of the works of Mrs Christie, but he had no idea what the man had been saying.

The Sergeant, who was used to Penrose’s tendency to allow his mind to wander, patiently repeated himself. ‘I was just saying about the hatpin, Sir. Turns out that millinery was her job. So perhaps it was just convenient to stab her with that.’

Penrose glanced at the hat which lay scuffed and crumpled on the floor close to the body, a casualty of the violence that had taken place. ‘Yes, perhaps.’ He looked at the girl intently, trying to see beyond features which had been dulled by death, to imagine what she had been like just a few hours ago and pinpoint what would have struck him about her had he passed her in the street.

With any murder investigation, he insisted on giving the dead a dignity and individuality which he could not always assume they had been afforded in life. The old adage was true: there were only a few genuine reasons for murder – love, greed and revenge topped the list – but each victim was different, and each had the right to be treated as if theirs were a unique death. He moved over to the body, close enough to notice a bloodstain on her collar. The mark indicated a cut to the neck but it was so small that it would have been easy to miss it. The victim’s head was tipped to one side and slightly forward, and he could see that a small patch of hair had been shaved off at the back. It had been roughly done – obviously the murderer had been in too much of a hurry to worry about breaking the skin – and a few strands of hair still lay on the girl’s left shoulder. Such an odd thing to do, he thought – so insignificant, and yet somehow so humiliating.