The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (138 page)

No great harm, then, in having a dekko of my own.

I lifted the sheet slowly, taking care not to disturb her hair, still laced with Juliet’s posies, which seemed to me the only vanity she had left.

Even in death, though, there was something exotic about Phyllis Wyvern, although after twenty-four hours, the body had begun its inevitable chemical dissolution, and had now taken on a gray and waxy appearance.

The awful pallor of her flesh—aside from her made-up face—gave her the appearance of a star from the days of the silent cinema, and for a moment I had the same awful feeling I’d had before: that she was playing the game of Statues, as I used to do with Feely and Daffy before they began to hate me—that in a moment she’d sneeze, or suck in a giant, gasping breath.

But no such thing happened, of course. Phyllis Wyvern was as dead as a door knocker.

I began my examination from the ground up. I lifted the hem of her heavy woolen skirt and saw at once that her ankles were swollen, ballooning out, as it were, above a pair of heavy black work boots.

Work boots? They couldn’t possibly be hers!

Using my handkerchief to guard against fingerprints, I slipped one of the boots off her foot … slowly and carefully, taking special note of the way the thick white stocking was bunched in a knot beneath her instep.

As I had suspected, the boot had been shoved onto her foot after she was dead.

With great care I rolled down the knee-length stocking and removed it. Her foot was puffy, dark, and bruised with the settling blood. Her painted toenails were ghastly.

I replaced the stocking, which slid on easily over her cold flesh.

Getting the boot back on, though, was not as easy as taking it off; the stiffened toes simply refused to slide all the way back into the boot. Could this be rigor mortis?

I pulled it off again and stuck my fingers into the opening. There was something pushed down into the toe—paper, by the feel of it.

Would someone as wealthy and famous as Phyllis Wyvern buy footwear so oversized that she had to stuff paper into the toes to make it fit?

It seemed unlikely. I fished out the wad with my finger and uncrumpled it.

It was a piece of stationery printed at the top with the name:
Cora Hotel, Upper Woburn Place, London, WC1
.

Scrawled across the page in red ink were the words:

Blast her handwriting (if it was hers). Was it “Must I tell T?”?

The paper was torn from the edge diagonally across the initial—the final letter could have been anything.

D for Desmond? D for Duncan? V for Val? Or was it a B for Bun?

No time to speculate, or even to crow over finding something the police had missed. I shoved the paper into the pocket of my cardigan for later analysis.

I struggled again to replace the boot, but because of the swelling in the legs, it was like trying to squeeze an elephant’s foot into a ballet slipper.

Remembering Flo, or Maeve, or whatever her name was, I dashed back into the adjacent room.

Yes! Just as I thought—the actress had left half a bowl of fruit pieces uneaten on the night table. I helped myself to the dessert spoon and returned to Miss Wyvern.

Using the bowl of the spoon as a shoehorn, I managed to lever the boot back onto her dead foot.

Better check the other one, something told me, and I quickly pried it off. Could there possibly be more of the message in the other toe?

No such luck. To my disappointment the second boot was empty, and I quickly levered it back onto her foot.

So much for the lower extremities.

Next step was to give her a jolly good sniffing. I had learned by experience that poison could underlie all seeming causes of death, and I was taking no chances.

I sniffed her lips (the upper one, I noticed, painted larger than it actually was with scarlet lipstick, perhaps to mask the faint mustache that was visible only at extremely close range), followed by her ears, her nose, her cleavage, her hands, and as much as I could manage of her armpits without actually shifting the body.

Nothing. Except for being dead, Phyllis Wyvern smelled exactly like someone who had, just hours ago, stepped out of a bath of scented salts.

She must have come straight from her performance to her room, removed her Juliet costume (it was still laid out flat on the bed), taken a bath, and then … what?

I used my handkerchief again to collect from the nape of her neck a small sample of the stage makeup I had noted earlier. Smeared onto the white linen, the greasepaint had the appearance of finely ground red brick.

I gave special attention to her fingernails, which had been coated with a shiny scarlet polish to match the lipstick. The cuticles formed stark half-moons of grayish white where the color had not been applied. Feely did her nails in that way, too, and I had a sudden but momentary attack of gooseflesh.

Steady on, old girl
, I thought.
It’s only death
.

Phyllis Wyvern certainly hadn’t been wearing these gaudily lacquered nails on stage. Quite the contrary—except for the slap, her interpretation of Juliet had been notable for its village-pump simplicity. The real-life Juliet, after all, had been no more than twelve or thirteen years old, or so Daffy liked to claim.

“If it weren’t for you lot,” she had once said mysteriously, “I could have Dirk Bogarde scaling my balcony even as we speak.”

Phyllis Wyvern, by contrast, was fifty-nine. She had told me so herself. How she managed to shed forty-five years under the lights was nothing short of a miracle.

Perhaps it was her size. She was really not that much bigger than me.

I’d better get on with it
, I thought. The actresses could return at any moment from their wild-goose chase, and be hammering at the locked door.

But something was niggling away at the back of my brain—something that was not quite right. What could it be?

I stepped back from the body for a more general look.

In her peasant blouse and skirt, Phyllis Wyvern looked as if she had just dropped into the chair to catch her breath before setting out to a masquerade.

Was it possible she had simply had a heart attack, perhaps, or suffered a sudden fatal stroke?

Of course not! There was no blotting out the sight of that dark decorative bow of ciné film twisted fancily around her throat. And besides, Dogger had pointed out the petechiae. The woman had been strangled. That much was clear. Part of my mind must still be milling away trying to reduce the horror of what must have been a violent scene.

From her hair to her—

Her hair! That was it!

Like little colored stars twinkling in the winter sky, Juliet’s crown of flowers was still woven into her long, golden hair. They could hardly be real, I thought. If they had been, they’d have wilted by now, and yet they looked as fresh as if they had been picked just moments before I came into the room.

I reached out and pinched a particularly dewy-looking primrose.

Hard to tell by touch. I gave the thing a jerk and—good lord!—Phyllis Wyvern’s hair, posies and all, went tumbling off her head and onto the floor with the sickening
whump
of a shot bird falling dead from the sky.

It was a wig, of course, and without it, she was as bald as a boiled egg.

A boiled egg mottled with even more of the petechiae, or Tardieu’s spots, as Dogger had called them.

I stared, aghast. What kind of nightmare had I stumbled into?

I retrieved the wig from the carpet and replaced it on her head, but no matter how much I twisted it this way and that, it still looked ludicrous.

Perhaps it was the knowledge of what lay beneath.

Well, I couldn’t spend all day fiddling with her coiffure. I finally had to give it up and turn my attention to the dresser, which I found to be littered with a various assortment of bottles and tins: theatrical cold creams, glycerine and rose water, rank upon rank of skin cleansers and assorted toiletries by Harriet Hubbard Ayer. Although the dresser top was a veritable apothecary’s shop, a few things were obviously missing: one was red theatrical makeup; the others included scarlet lipstick and nail polish.

I had a quick rummage through her purse, but aside from a handful of paper tissues, a wallet containing six hundred and twenty-five pounds, and a handful of loose change, there was little of real interest: a tortoiseshell comb, a pocket mirror, and a tin of breath mints (of which I helped myself to one and pocketed a couple of extras for quick energy, should I need it later).

I was about to close the clasp when I spotted the zipper, barely visible against the lining, a careful camouflage by the purse’s maker.

Hullo!
I thought.
What’s this? A secret compartment!

Disappointingly, there wasn’t much in it—a set of keys and a small but official-looking booklet consisting of two gray pages with the same information repeated on each of them.

COUNTY OF LONDON

License to drive a Motor Car or Motor Cycle

Phyllida Lampman

“Tenebrae”

3 Collier’s Walk, S.E
.

It had been issued on the thirteenth day of May, 1929.

Phyllida? Lampman?

Could this be Phyllis Wyvern’s real name? It seemed beyond belief that she would keep a stranger’s driving license in her purse.

But assuming that Phyllida was Phyllis or the other way around, what was I to make of the rest of it? Was she Val Lampman’s wife? Sister? Sister-in-law? Cousin?

“Cousin” and “wife” were distinctly possible. In fact, she could be both. Harriet, for instance, had been a de Luce before she married Father, and because of it had been spared having to give up her maiden name.

If Phyllis Wyvern hadn’t lied to me about her age—and why would she?—she must have been … let me see … 1929 had been twenty-one years ago … thirty-eight years old when this driving license was issued.

How old was Val Lampman? It was hard to tell. He was one of those gnomish creatures with tight shiny skin and pale hair who, with a silk scarf at his neck to hide the wrinkles, could pass for ageless.

What was it Daffy had said? That not since something or another—which I was too young to understand—had Phyllis Wyvern worked with any other director.

What could that something be? It was becoming plainer by the minute that, by fair means or foul, I needed to pry open my sister’s clammy shell.

I was having a second look at Phyllis Wyvern’s fingernails when the doorknob turned!

I almost had an accident!

Fortunately the door was locked.

I crammed the driving license back into the purse and pulled the zipper shut. I picked up the sheet from the floor and, trying not to make a rustling noise, hurriedly re-draped the body.

That done, I fumbled my way behind the curtain, which gave off another cloud of choking dust.

I grabbed the bridge of my nose and squeezed just in time to reduce a major sneeze to a tiny, but rather rude, exclamation point of sound.

“Pee-phwup.”

Bless me!

I had to be careful about the paint-swollen door. I couldn’t close it as tightly behind me as I wished, but had to settle instead for a couple of careful, but almost silent, tugs. The curtains in each room would not only muffle the sound, but perhaps even keep all but the most determined observer from noticing the door’s very existence.

Happily, the mess of paint chips I had dislodged was on my side of the door and I couldn’t help congratulating myself on leaving the Blue Bedroom without a trace.

Taking Flo’s—or Maeve’s—hairbrush from the dresser (after replacing their dessert spoon carefully in its bowl of fruit) and forming a makeshift dustpan of the
Cinema Weekly
that was lying on the bed, I swept up the paint chips and tipped them carefully into the pocket of my cardigan.

I’d dispose of them later. No point in leaving confusing evidence to distract the police.

I opened the door a crack and peeked out. No one in sight as far as I could see.

As I stepped into the corridor, a familiar voice behind me said, “Hold on.”

I had nearly stepped on Inspector Hewitt’s toes.

“Oh, hello, Inspector,” I said. “I was just looking for, uh, Flo.”

I could tell at once that he didn’t believe me.

“Were you, indeed?” he asked. “Why?”

Damn the man! His questions were always so to the point.

“That’s not quite true,” I confessed. “Actually, I was snooping in her room.”

No need to drag in my fib about the summons from Val Lampman.

“Why?” the Inspector persisted.

Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to tell the truth.

“Well,” I said, scrambling madly for words, “actually it’s a hobby of mine. I sometimes snoop on Daffy and Feely quite frightfully.”

He stared at me with what somebody once called “that awful eye.”