Last Nocturne (28 page)

Cogan had saved his own news-gathering and now, with the air of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he told Lamb of his visit to Adelaide Crescent and his conversation with Miss Kitteridge. Lamb snapped to attention when he heard of Theo’s visitor.

‘A foreigner? What sort, French, Italian – German?’

‘She couldn’t say. But her description of the chap set me thinking. Might be nothing in it, but it put me in mind of something I noticed when I was looking through Benton’s papers – you know, the ones on that trestle table of his.’

‘I remember. Go on.’

Cogan produced a single sheet of paper from the desk where it had been lying, weighted down with his bunch of keys. ‘I dug it out, sir. It was with everything else of his that we’ve kept. A drawing under the last couple of lines of a letter, by the looks of it. I didn’t take much heed of it at the time, thinking it was just a doodle, and being as how the writing was in a foreign language – might have been Chinese for all I could make of it. Though I did think that a man ought to know how to spell his own name – he’d put a ‘c’ in his signature – F-r-a-n-c-k. But DC Smithers tells me that’s a German surname – or Austrian.’

‘Smithers? How does he know that?’

‘His mother’s a German, but he don’t like being reminded of it, and I can’t say as I blame him for keeping quiet, folks being what they are about Germans just now. Speaks the lingo himself.’

Lamb took the sheet of thin, onionskin paper with the two lines of spidery foreign writing, and the scrawled signature, a squiggle of an initial which could have been anything, followed by ‘Franck’. Beneath that was a rough sketch. Done absent-mindedly, perhaps, while thinking over the contents of the letter. It showed a man wearing a stiff collar and a pair of pince-nez. A thin face, but unremarkable.

‘Not much help. Could be anyone – except that it does seem to tally with the description Miss Kitteridge gave you. Pity he used charcoal on this paper. It’s too smudged to be a lot of good, I should think. But it might just help in tracing him, which it looks as though we need to do, urgently. It’s worth a try, anyway.’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Cogan, with a decided lack of enthusiasm. How many hotels and boarding houses did that mean? Even if limited to establishments kept by Germans, where the language was spoken and the food acceptable to foreign palates unaccustomed to kidneys and kedgeree for breakfast? Where a man wearing pince-nez, a green coat and even with a feather in his hat might pass unremarked?

‘And I want all the Channel ports alerted to be on the look out for him. Now that we have a name and a description.’

Cogan coughed. ‘Already done that, sir. No result, so far. Long gone, no doubt.’

‘Good man – but keep at it, all the same.’ Lamb pulled out his pocket watch. ‘Smithers still in the building?’

‘Likely gone home to his sausage and sauerkraut, by now, but I’ll see if I can catch him. I was thinking he might make himself useful,’ he said and added, ‘he has a brother-in-law works on a newspaper in Vienna.’

‘Hmm. We’ll remember that – but I’m not inclined to involve the press just yet. There are other ways Smithers can be of use.’

Contact with a Viennese journalist might be useful, but for any help needed, first he would contact the Vienna police. They would no doubt be eager to help, especially since he would do them the courtesy of sending the request in their own language. Until now he’d had little to warrant asking for their assistance – no specific dates and only a few English names. Moreover, he was by no means sure even yet that whatever had occurred there, even though it might have set in train the two deaths over here, was anything but a private matter which might never have come to the attention of the police. However, this Franck who had turned up on the scene, German or most likely Austrian, altered matters, and with the prospect of at last having a prime suspect in Theo’s death, he now had reason to request information about any untoward events which may have happened fairly recently at Silbergasse 7. This was the address Joseph Benton had given as the one where Theo had stayed during his time in Vienna.

Smithers, being duly caught before he left the building, came in with alacrity, ready to translate the last few lines of the letter, eager to have those who’d made sly digs at his German ancestry smirking on the other side of their faces. He grimaced on seeing the cramped and spidery Continental writing, but once through that, the translation was easy; there were only a couple of lines, seemingly forming the end of a sentence: ‘…
if you persist in your—’
allegations, accusations, Smithers wasn’t quite sure which, and continued,
‘You are mistaken and one way or another I intend to show you how wrong you are when I see you.’

The men looked at one another. At a pinch, this could be seen simply as an indication to expect a visit. On the other hand, in view of what had happened to Theo, it sounded more like a veiled threat. Lamb gathered his thoughts and told Smithers what he wanted.

‘Keep it short,’ Cogan advised the constable. ‘The electric telegraph don’t come cheap.’

‘Well done, Smithers,’ said Lamb when the wire had been despatched. ‘No doubt we’ll need you again when there’s a reply, meanwhile get off home to your supper. You, too, Sergeant, you’ve a busy day ahead of you tomorrow, with all those boarding-houses,’ he added slyly. ‘Good night.’

Cogan grunted. “Night, sir. Oh, by the by, there’s a letter on your desk. Delivered by hand.’

When Lamb opened the letter he saw from the firm signature at the bottom of the few lines on the single sheet of thick cream paper that it was from Guy Martagon. His mother knew now that the police had been told about the letters, he wrote, and perhaps the inspector would call at Embury Square as soon as convenient? Lamb thought of his supper. Then about the references to Vienna which had apparently occurred in those letters which had been stolen.

Vienna, Vienna, Vienna. It came back to Vienna every time. Like an eternal circle, a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

He was hungry but abandoned the idea of going straight home. His landlady was used to his non-appearances. He would pick up a pie or a hot meal somewhere later.

He’d forgotten that Edwina Martagon would probably be dressing for one of the glittering evening occasions which were part of the daily round for socialites such as she, and that she might well refuse to see him at that hour, especially as his visit was unannounced, which she would undoubtedly see as an unforgivable breach of etiquette. But from his point of view it made sense not to give her the opportunity of refusing to let the police proceed with the recovery of the letters, as he thought Mrs Martagon might well do, recalling what her son had said at the gallery and the terse note Guy Martagon had sent.

Still, he contemplated the meeting with her without pleasure. She was the kind of woman with whom he always seemed to come off second best, who would undoubtedly try to put him in his place. Determined this wasn’t going to happen, he pressed hard on the bell push of the handsomely painted front door in Embury Square.

After a lengthy wait among the potted palms and scented flowers in the impressive, richly furnished hallway, and an awareness of a flurry of activity in the house, he was informed by the tall footman who had opened the door to him that Mrs Martagon could see him for half an hour in the morning room. He followed the man’s stately progress down the hall into a predominantly yellow room, decorated with a plethora of the blue and white china which people seemed to admire lately, a room which undoubtedly would be at its best in the early part of the day. Here at the back of the house as the day was drawing in, the electric light had been turned on, and the room’s blue and yellow, no doubt pleasant enough in the morning light, looked harsh and garish in the light given by the bulbs in the suspended ceiling bowl.

He sensed at once that he’d stepped into a domestic situation. No one was saying anything. Guy Martagon came forward to shake hands with him and offer him a seat, then took up a head of the household position with his back to the fire, standing silently with his hands clasped behind him.

Edwina Martagon had seated herself on a fashionable settle-type piece of furniture with a high back and an exceedingly narrow seat, which appeared to offer no discomfort to her, however. It would have seemed impossible for anyone to droop on this instrument of torture, but her daughter Dulcie, beside her in a plain, unadorned, plum-coloured dress, nursing a little pug dog, asleep on her lap, managed to give that impression. She sat with her shoulders bowed and after a quick, shy smile, went back to stroking the little dog’s fur.

His decision to arrive unannounced was seemingly not altogether the ill-timed disaster it might have been, however, since Mrs Martagon was already magnificently attired for the evening. She had on an evening gown in emerald green velvet, jewels winked in her ears and around her neck, and a matching aigrette was fastened in her abundant hair. He met the steady glance of Miss Thurley. He was pleased to see her there; from what he had previously seen of her he thought her likely to bring the proceedings down to earth although, from the occasional glance that passed between her and Guy Martagon, there was evidently a good deal more in Miss Thurley to admire than common sense.

As soon as he was seated Mrs Martagon took charge, surprising him by graciously apologising for having brought him to the house on what she called false pretences. ‘I’m at a loss to know why my son should have bothered you with such a trifling matter,’ she added, without so much as a glance at Guy.

Looking at that imperious face, Lamb suddenly found a totally unexpected sympathy for her. The letters were of interest to him only if they could throw any light on that Viennese affair, whatever it had been, but to Edwina Martagon they might well spell disaster. Their importance in that direction was probably exaggerated, but he could see that to be involved in a vulgar scandal would be nothing less than social suicide to her and could sympathise, though he was impatient with the curious dichotomy which turned a blind eye to licentious behaviour – as long as it was not made public – but pilloried the participants if it was. ‘She hopes to remarry,’ Guy had said. Scandal could well put an end to those hopes, at least for a very long time, and Mrs Martagon was no longer young and could hardly afford to wait until the memory faded.

She turned to him and said, ‘I’m sorry you have been troubled with this trifling matter, Chief Inspector. I am happy to say that it has now resolved itself. I have given it a good deal of thought and I now know who has the letters.’ Into an astonished silence, she continued imperturbably, ‘I shall myself take steps to retrieve them.’

‘I see.’ Lamb paused. ‘May I ask the name of this person?’

‘It was a woman whom I once mistakenly employed…a Miss Eugenia Dart. Miss Snake-in-the-grass, as it turns out.’

Both her children spoke together. Guy, driven to break his silence, said with an incredulous half-laugh, ‘Mother, how can you possibly know that? You can’t make these sort of unfounded allegations,’ while Dulcie simply cried, ‘Mama!’

Mrs Martagon ignored her son, and the icy look she turned on her daughter could have frozen the Thames. Dulcie rushed on, undeterred. ‘How can you say such a thing, without proof?’

‘I need no more proof than the evidence of my own eyes. I never trusted her, the way she made herself free with your father, pretending to ask his opinion of those footling translations she used to waste her time on. Always with their heads together.’

Dulcie raised what Lamb saw to be a pair of remarkably fine eyes, dark and lustrous, to meet her mother’s look. Her chin went up. ‘Those footling translations, Mama, are all she has to live on now.’

‘And whose fault is that, pray?’

‘Who is Miss Dart?’ asked Lamb, deeming it time to intervene.

It took some unravelling, each member of the family wanting to put forward their own interpretation on some event which had occurred some time before, involving this person, but the facts emerged in the end: Miss Dart, it appeared, was a young woman whom Mrs Martagon had employed as a social secretary, who had left – or been dismissed, this point of view differing according to who stated it – after an unfortunate incident concerning some smashed pottery. Sensing this was a touchy issue, Lamb didn’t allow it to progress. The young woman, who had Russian antecedents and spoke that language and several more, now earned her living by translating foreign literature into English, and vice versa, he was told.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen her since she left?’

‘She has been very brave and has taken an apartment of her own in Pimlico,’ said Dulcie, with a quick glance at her mother, nervous again.

‘Pimlico!’ echoed Edwina, triumphantly. ‘So there we have it. Miss Dart! I might have known – but we will not, Mr Lamb, speak of my daughter’s underhand and unseemly action!’

‘It may have been unseemly, but I didn’t mean to be underhand, Mama,’ Dulcie said quietly, her eyes filling with tears.

‘You went to see Miss Dart without permission, knowing I would not have given it.’