Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) (5 page)

‘Imeretrelpyer.’

‘
Je m’excuse?’
Startled, Auguste glanced down at the source of this squeak.

Roughly level with his chest was the dirtiest white cap he’d ever seen, crammed over long unkempt greasy hair, atop a broomhandle, or, on second glance, the skinniest girl he’d ever seen. Her boots were cracked, her too-short skirts revealed bony bare ankles, her print gown was covered by a dirty white apron. The latter was unnecessary since the dress was dirty enough in its own right. The face stared confidingly and gap-toothed up at him, then cracked in a large grin.

‘I’m Lizzie.’

‘You’re a waitress, Miss Eliza?’ he asked faintly.

‘Nah. I’m yer cook.’

If ever there was a time to prove Auguste Didier was a man of resolution, this was it. He took out his pocket watch. Three-thirty. Happily providence had brought him here early. Will Lamb would not be arriving at the Old King Cole in the care of Nettie Turner until this evening and whatever culinary fate might be in store
for the lucky diners tonight was presumably already stacked up, probably in some verminous outhouse. Meanwhile, garnish could do much to disguise even the worst of culinary disasters, he told himself.

‘Lizzie, kindly call a cab for us.’

‘You’re not leaving?’ wailed Jowitt.

‘And taking this young lady with me. Merely for an hour, Mr Jowitt. Should any bailiffs call, kindly lock them in the cellar.’

Lizzie looked scared. ‘There ain’t no cabs round here.’

‘An omnibus then, Lizzie. Any mode of transport.’

‘Ma don’t like me going out with strange men.’

‘How old are you, Lizzie?’

‘Sixteen.’

Auguste choked. He’d put her down as ten, and promptly abandoned his original instinct to remove her to the nearest tin bath, strip her and immerse her in a bath of disinfectant. He executed all his considerable charm. ‘Lizzie, please take me to the nearest outfitters.’

‘Commercial Road’s the best,’ Lizzie said doubtfully.

Bond Street it was not, and there were none of the new horseless buses here, but they had emerged an hour later from an outfitters of sorts, a large parcel tucked firmly under Lizzie’s arm, from which she would not be parted.

‘For me?’ Lizzie asked in wonder for the twentieth time.

‘Only after a visit to the Public Baths,
ma fille?

He handed Lizzie plus parcel, twopence, and a threepenny tip over to the attendant. Half an hour later a Lizzie of totally different hue shyly emerged. She was bright red from the scrubbing, and much of her hair
had vanished. What there was left made her look like a hopeful hedgehog.

‘My dad will take a strap to me, looking like a tart.’

‘The only tart you resemble, Lizzie, is a strawberry one.’

She eyed him doubtfully. ‘I don’t look like a tart, then?’

Auguste studied the most visible of the new clothes, the new brown print gown, fitting over the young breasts and modestly sinking beneath stocking-clad ankles. He compared her briefly with the ladies who strolled the Empire Promenade. ‘No,’ he said. Then, ominously, ‘What is that bundle under your arm, Lizzie?’

‘Me working clothes, of course,’ she said in surprise. ‘I can’t work togged up like this, can I?’

None too gently he wrested the package from her, and threw it in a zinc bin destined for the adjoining wash-house.

‘What you doing?’ she howled in anguish.

‘Lizzie,’ he said, ‘cook for me, watch for me,
help
me, and you shall have enough to buy yourself twenty such dresses. Will you do that?’

Lizzie considered, rather too long to please Auguste entirely. ‘Yus,’ she told him eventually.

‘Excellent,
ma petite.’
So pleased was he at this non-acrimonious agreement, so filled with dreams as to what he could teach this young disciple, and then so taken with the wares of the elderly woman at the kerbside selling hot pig’s trotters, that he failed to notice Lizzie had reclaimed her precious bundle, as she dutifully climbed up after him to the open-air deck of the bus.

‘You enjoy your work,
ma fille?’

Enjoy? Lizzie looked at him blankly, and he tried another tack.

‘The Old King Cole is a happy place?’

‘Old Jowitt’s a rum cove.’

‘That I see, but the artistes? You like them?’ He perceived from the blank expression that he was getting nowhere. The Lizzies of this world had no time for reflecting on their lot. He changed tack. ‘Tell me about them, those that come to the eating-room.’

‘Mist’rill.’

Auguste’s turn to look blank.

‘Max Hill,’ she repeated, ‘old cove. Does impersonations. Eats chops.’ She peeped at him to see if this was what he wanted and encouraged, swept on: ‘Mr Brodie, big he is. Jolly. Pats me bum, beefsteak man, hates Harry Pickles, he’s a one. Eels and bangers, don’t like Brodie, Brodie don’t like him. Miguel, he’s a juggler, smarmy, thinks he’s a swell, but he ain’t, ’cos he eats his eels jellied and whelks. Mariella’s pretty – and don’t she know it.’ She giggled. ‘You’ll be meeting her,’ she added mysteriously.

‘You like her?’ Auguste inquired, interested at the mention of Will Lamb’s former love. Seeing her look of doubt, he added hastily, ‘And what does she eat?’

‘She won’t eat nothing of ours,’ Lizzie said crossly. ‘But I reckons she’d be a shrimps-and-pie lady.’

Auguste regarded her in wonder.
‘Mapetite
, you have the makings of a true connoisseur of cuisine.’ To find someone after his own heart in such a place cheered him immensely.

‘Gam,’ snorted Lizzie, not understanding a word.

A brief reconnoitre backstage told Auguste much about the financial state of the Old King Cole. It looked and smelled of failure. There were two large dressing-rooms at the rear of the building next to the stage door, and a series of cubby-holes opposite the cramped wings and backstage area, two of which, according to hastily pinned notices, had been allotted to Nettie and Will; the others spilled ancient props and lighting paraphernalia out of their doors. The performers, he understood, arrived in most cases only for their particular turns and for the moment he had the place to himself. Or so he thought.

‘Ah. How good of you, my dear chap, to keep a lookout for bailiffs.’ Percy Jowitt descended on him, beaming.

Auguste surrendered. ‘Could any bailiffs get in here undetected?’ he asked.

Jowitt looked nonplussed. ‘People come and go,’ he said vaguely.

‘Is the stage door kept locked?’

‘No. But bailiffs get in anywhere, you know.’

Auguste abandoned bailiffs. Was it your idea to ask Will Lamb to play here?’

‘Certainly.’

‘The idea stemmed from you.’

‘Naturally. I am the proprietor.’ Percy puffed out his chest.

‘What put the idea in your head?’

‘Do you know, I really can’t say. It might,’ Percy acknowledged, ‘have been Pickles.’

‘You mean faggots and pickles?’

‘No, no. Our loveable Cockney chappie, Harry Pickles.
Nettie Turner’s husband. Rather surprised me when he suggested it because he doesn’t like Will Lamb. Jealous, I think. But then all my regulars have the good of the Old King Cole at heart,’ he explained complacently.

‘Does everyone here wish it well?’

‘Good heavens, yes,’ Percy declared. ‘They all love the place. And each other.’ He paused. ‘Mostly, that is.’

Heat hit him like the full force of Jem Mace’s heavyweight fist. Auguste observed that the hell that had the presumption to call itself a kitchen did have outlets to the outside world, but it felt to him like a sealed Turkish bath. The idea of murder within these steaming walls did not seem so preposterous now. He remembered Will would be arriving with Nettie just before or soon after the performance started. Time was running short, with only two hours to sum up what he was dealing with, and
whom
he was dealing with. At the moment the ‘what’ was taking precedence. He recalled the London particular, the thick fog through which he’d once battled his way, only to find murder awaiting him at the end. Heat was like fog. It confused, it drummed in upon you, numbing the senses. He listened to Lizzie’s monologue as she rushed hither and thither from stove to gridiron. ‘I got the pies, mutton and eel. I done the pickled eels and faggots . . . I fries the fish, you broils yer chops.’ You?
Him! He
was the chef in this nightmare surrounding him and in half an hour’s time the customers would be pouring through the door.

Panic spurred him to action, as he raced through the furnace of the underground kitchen after the quicksilver Lizzie, averting his eyes from the grease, crumbs and vegetable detritus that liberally gave witness of her endeavours during the day.

‘What is this horrible mess on the floor, Lizzie?’ A white gooey mess that looked like frozen porridge.

‘’Ere’s yer faggots, Mr D. Cockroaches.’

This was hell indeed. ‘You serve cockroaches here?’ he asked faintly. ‘Soup, perhaps?’

Lizzie stared at him. ‘That what you do in France, is it? I kills ’em here. That’s what the white stuff’s for. Oatmeal and Plaster of Paris.’

Auguste opened his mouth and shut it again. Time enough for hygiene tomorrow. Tonight he must survive as best he could under Lizzie’s mercurial management; he needed all his antennae trained on Will Lamb.

At least,
nearly
all his antennae. One must be spared for this horrible astringent smell from one of the cooking pots.

‘
What
is that, if you please, Miss Lizzie?’

‘Pickle for tomorrow’s eels. Want to see ’em?’ She led the way to a larder, and flung open the door with pride. Hanging in rows from hooks were what appeared to be a dozen ladies’ stockinged legs.

‘Eels boiled in cloth,’ Lizzie said proudly. ‘And there’s your faggots too. Good, ain’t they? Pig’s caul and liver.’

He duly praised her. These were the delicacies of which he had heard so much? He tried hard to ignore a murmur of protest in his stomach. After all, was not much of the exquisite charcuterie of France the result of similar cooking processes? It was merely the
unfamiliar made these appear so unappetising. This is what his brain told him, but his stomach began to contradict it vigorously, and with Lizzie in anxious pursuit, he hurried back to the upper floor in the hope he might track down the last few gulps of oxygen available before customers began to arrive. There would then be, so he had understood, a brisk trade in pies and potatoes.
Potatoes!
Where were they?

Even as the thought rushed through his mind, Lizzie, faithfully on his heels, cried, ‘Where you bin, Fred?’

Auguste glanced up from his frantic inspection. At the window he saw faces pressed to the glass like Oliver Twist’s in the workhouse. Through the door loped a skeleton in ragged evening dress, which had obviously started in Jermyn Street and found the journey to the East End hard in the extreme. On top of the skeleton’s six-foot frame was a top-hat which it raised politely.

‘Good evening, Miss Lizzie,’ it replied humbly in a hoarse voice. ‘Business detained me, for I am performing my tasks on the cans to which I must speedily return.’

‘Fred’s a sword-swallower for the queues outside, Mr Didier,’ Lizzie informed him, ‘but he does the spuds as well. He’s a dab hand at ’em.’

Of course, Auguste thought resignedly, what more natural than to have a sword-swallower as an assistant cook?

‘He cooks ’em on the spikes over the fires in the cans – and we keep ’em hot here.’ She indicated the filthy range.

Auguste did not doubt it – what he doubted was if anything in this hell-hole could be kept cool.

Mr Frederick Wolf regarded his new temporary
superior apologetically. ‘I fear there is little profit in sword-swallowing nowadays. I entertain the queue with my act, for it is my duty, but the rewards for my art are insufficient for my continued survival,’ he informed Auguste gravely. ‘I trust, sir, you have no objection to my continuing my tasks here? I assure you I turn a most delightful floury potato, it positively floats to the plate beneath, so light and airy is its nature. And I am most judicious in my seasoning. I am also dexterous with a poached egg,’ he added hopefully.

‘I am delighted to welcome you to my staff.’ Auguste meant it.

Another burden was lifted from him. He wondered idly whether those potatoes might be improved upon . . . a little cheese or cream adorned with a pickled nasturtium seed perhaps? There might be avenues to be explored here.

But not now. In the next half an hour his stomach was put to the severe test of ordeal by piles of fatty mutton chops and, to his horrified eye, tough steaks and tired herrings destined for the gridirons. He reflected on the nearness of Smithfield Market with relief. Here was one instant improvement he could make. Whoever was responsible for the provision of these horrors would be subjected to a series of lectures on the art of choosing meat and fish. Huge canisters of pease pudding stood steaming on the range, side by side with dishes of saveloys and fish. Fresh fish, kippers and herrings, with a dish of something that might conceivably in the siege of Paris have passed for batter, stood by a heap of dull grey haddock. He eyed them unenthusiastically. There was, he gathered, a fish
market at nearby Shadwell. Sturgeon was in season, oysters – like Alexis Soyer he, Auguste Didier, would make a contribution to the noble cause of spreading knowledge of food, no matter what the pocket that sought it. A stirring of something that might possibly be professional interest replaced the queasiness in his stomach.