Two for Sorrow (18 page)

‘And? Oh for God's sake, Bill, just tell me.'

‘Someone's stitched her mouth up.'

‘Jesus Christ!' Penrose paused before getting into the car, and tried to rid himself of the images crowding his mind. ‘Please God, no,' he said, more quietly this time.

‘Come on, Sir—we don't know anything for sure yet,' Fallowfield said calmly, taking the keys from Penrose's hand and going round to the driver's side. ‘She was found in the workroom. The other body's outside in the yard—looks like he fell down the stairs on his way out.'

‘And who reported it?'

‘Chap called Gaunt. Ellis Gaunt, I think.'

The name meant nothing to Penrose, but then very little else did either. The short journey from the Embankment to St Martin's Lane was a blur to him, and he was out of the car even before Fallowfield had brought it to a standstill in front of number 66. Just inside the gates, he saw Lettice and Ronnie comforting an older woman whom he recognised as their head
cutter; another man—presumably the Gaunt who'd made the call—stood awkwardly to the side, at a discreet distance from the group of women, as if reluctant to intrude on their sorrow. All of them looked up, startled, as Penrose ran over to them. ‘Thank God,' he said, scarcely caring that it was not the most professional of responses. ‘I thought for a moment that one of you …'

‘No, Archie—we're fine.' Lettice smiled weakly, but she and Ronnie both looked ten years older than when he had last seen them, and Ronnie in particular seemed to be struggling to keep her emotions under control—anger, he noticed, rather than tears, but that was what he would have expected; ever since they were children, Ronnie's response to grief or injustice had always been to rage against it rather than admit her vulnerability. The other lady—why couldn't he remember her name?—was making a valiant effort to pull herself together, but in vain: she stared down at the handkerchief in her hands, winding one of the corners repeatedly round her finger and shaking her head; she seemed grateful when Lettice saved her from having to go over what had happened straight away. ‘No, it's Marjorie who's been killed—Marjorie Baker, one of our girls. Hilda found her father over by the steps when she came in to work this morning. She went up to telephone for help, and that's when she found Marjorie's body.'

Penrose glanced over to the foot of the iron staircase. ‘There's another way we can get up to the workroom, isn't there?' he asked.

‘Yes, through the clients' entrance at the front and up the stairs there.' Lettice opened her bag and took out a set of keys. ‘Here, you'll need these.'

Penrose walked back to the street, where Fallowfield was
getting some gloves and other equipment out of the car, and handed him the keys. ‘Have a quick look round inside, Bill—I want to get everyone out of the yard. They've had a shock and they shouldn't be out here in these temperatures, but check everywhere first. We don't want any more surprises.'

He returned to the group and spoke gently to the woman who had found the body. ‘I'm so very sorry for what you've been through. My sergeant's just checking the premises and sealing off the workroom. He won't be long, and then I'll need to ask you a few questions. We can do it in one of the rooms here, or, if you'd rather not go back into the building straight away, I'm sure I can find us somewhere nearby to talk.'

‘No, no—it's fine,' she said. ‘I don't want to make any more work for you.'

‘We'll go into the flat upstairs in a minute,' Lettice said, squeezing Hilda's shoulder. ‘It's chock-a-block with materials, but it's quiet and well away from everything, and at least we can have some tea to warm us up.'

Penrose was grateful for his cousin's tact. The comings and goings of photographers, scene-of-crime officers and mortuary vans were not comfortable things to witness for anyone who didn't work with them, and he needed Hilda to concentrate without any upsetting distractions. ‘You must be Mr Gaunt?' he said, holding his hand out to the man by the gates. ‘I'm Detective Inspector Penrose. I gather you reported the murder?'

‘That's right,' Gaunt said. ‘I was on my way to work, when I saw Mrs Reader coming out from the yard. She was obviously upset about something, so I stopped to find out what was wrong. She asked me to wait down here with the man's body while she went to call the police, just to make sure that nobody
else came into the yard. Then I heard her screaming, so I went straight up—I thought she was in trouble.' He paused, looking at Hilda Reader. ‘When I saw what had happened, I was so sorry that I'd let her go up and make the call, but it seemed the best thing at the time—she knew where the telephone was and everything. But I wish I could have saved her from seeing that. It's terrible up there—even more so for anyone who knew the girl.'

‘You weren't to know,' Penrose said, impressed by the young man's decency. ‘What did you do when you got upstairs?'

‘I asked Mrs Reader where the telephone was, and told her to wait in the corridor. Then I called you.'

‘And you came down together as soon as you'd finished.'

‘No, Archie—they did a little light dusting and finished the spring collection. Of course they came straight down—they're hardly going to stay up there with a human pin cushion, are they?' Ronnie's frustration had finally got the better of her, but there were tears in her eyes as she glared at him.

Gaunt looked uncomfortable, but Penrose nodded encouragingly at him to continue. ‘More or less straight down, Sir. Mrs Reader wanted me to telephone her employers as well. So I went back to do that, and then we came down here to wait.'

‘We came straight away,' Lettice explained. ‘We just couldn't believe it. I suppose we'd been here about five or ten minutes before you arrived.'

‘And neither of you have left the courtyard?'

‘No, of course not. We knew we mustn't touch anything.'

‘There is one thing, though.' Hilda Reader spoke so faintly that Penrose could hardly hear what she was saying. ‘Upstairs I … it was the smell, you see. I couldn't stop myself. The shock of finding her there like that, seeing what he'd done to her. I'm
afraid I … I was sick. I couldn't help it,' she said again. ‘I'm sorry—I hope I haven't ruined anything.'

‘Oh, Hilda,' Lettice said, wrapping her arms round her. ‘How bloody awful for you. There's no need to be sorry.'

‘Lettice is right, Mrs Reader,' Penrose said. ‘There's absolutely no need to apologise—it's a perfectly natural reaction.'

‘I didn't realise she was dead at first, you see,' Hilda explained. ‘She had her back to me, and when I saw her I thought that something had gone on between her and her father. If I'm honest, I thought she'd hurt him—then I realised it was the other way round.'

‘Why did you think that Marjorie had hurt her father?' Penrose asked.

‘Because he was hanging around here at lunchtime yesterday, asking to see her. She went over the road to meet him, and when she came back she seemed upset—angry, really. I think she was ashamed of him—she never talked about her home life. She kept apologising in case he'd been any bother to me.'

‘It's us that should be sorry,' Lettice said. ‘All the time it was going on, we were just across the road at the theatre. My God,' she added, remembering, ‘we even saw the lights go out. We could have helped her.'

‘What time was that?'

‘Just after the play finished, so around ten-fifteen, I suppose. We should have gone up to see her, like we said we would. We should never have let this happen.'

‘Damn right we shouldn't.' Ronnie lit a cigarette and looked provocatively at Archie, daring him to forbid her to smoke at a crime scene. ‘Why didn't we know that Marjorie was in trouble? Because we never have time to talk to those girls about anything except work, that's why. We're so busy with
our plays and our reviews and our fucking charity galas that we can't see what's going on under our roof. I swear to God, if that bastard hadn't cracked his own skull open, I'd be more than happy to do it for him.'

Fallowfield reappeared in the yard and nodded discreetly to Penrose. ‘The rest of the building's clear, Sir,' he said. ‘Nothing looks out of place except in the workroom.'

‘Fine. Well, if everyone could go up to the flat now, I'll be with you as soon as I can. And Mr Gaunt—you must be very late for work, so we won't keep you any longer at the moment. We'll need a formal statement from you in due course, and there may be some further questions—let Detective Sergeant Fallowfield know how we can get hold of you, and you're free to go. Can we give you a lift anywhere?'

‘No thank you, Sir—I'm only a couple of minutes away. I work at the Coliseum.'

‘Stage crew?' Penrose asked, and Gaunt nodded. They watched as Lettice and Ronnie led Hilda Reader round to the front of the building. ‘Thank you for what you've done this morning,' Penrose added. ‘It can't have been easy for you. I'd appreciate it if you could keep the details to yourself at the moment. Miss Baker's remaining family will have to be told and I need to establish exactly what happened here—and all that will be much less painful without the help of the evening papers. Can I rely on you not to mention names to anyone?'

‘Yes, of course,' Gaunt said.

For once, Penrose actually believed the answer he was given. ‘Is the team on its way?' he asked Fallowfield. ‘This snow's not much at the moment, but it's going to get worse.'

‘Should be here any minute, Sir. I caught Spilsbury on his way out—said he'd come right over.'

‘Excellent.' Penrose left Fallowfield to take down Gaunt's details, and walked over to the foot of the staircase. Standing at a distance, so as not to disturb the area immediately around the body, he looked down at the dead man. He lay with his head towards the stairs and parallel with the building, one hand close to his face, the other flung out behind him, just touching the step, as though he had still been trying to save himself when he hit the ground. In his sixties, Penrose guessed, and, from what he could see where the snow had not settled, shabbily dressed. Crouching down, he noticed the raw, red discolouration on the man's knuckles where his skin had been exposed to the cold; the snow had done its quiet work, drifting, enfolding, obliterating; imperceptibly draining his life if the fall had not killed him, and creating more difficulties for those investigating his death.

Penrose turned his back on Baker and headed upstairs through the front entrance to try to piece together the last moments of his daughter's life, stopping on the way to fetch his bag from the car. He stood just inside the door to the workroom, taking advantage of the stillness before forensics arrived to absorb the scene as a whole. Once the detailed analysis of individual pieces of evidence began, the chance to do this was lost, so he was always relieved to be the first professional to arrive at the scene of a crime; photographs were invaluable, and many a cruel murder had been solved in the photographic department high above the Thames, but, for Penrose, there was no substitute for his own first impressions. Carefully, he put his bag down on the table nearest the door and took out some gloves, then walked slowly into the room. It was a scene of nauseating horror. Marjorie was slumped on an upright wooden chair and, although he could see the extent of her
injuries in the mirror, nothing could have prepared him for the trauma of looking directly into her face. It was impossible to imagine what she might have been like in life, so distorted and mutilated were her features. Blood and vomit had trickled down her nose and out through the stitches in her lips. It ran in narrow lines down her face and onto the front of her sewing smock, defacing the Motley monogram. Penrose noticed the small pieces of black glass which mingled with it and realised that Marjorie's suffering must have begun long before the needle touched her skin. As he looked closer, he could see tiny cuts and grazes all around her nose and on her cheeks, presumably from glass which had missed her mouth in the violence of the attack; some of the beads were still on the table next to the body, and he saw that they had been roughly crushed to make their edges even sharper and more deadly. Her swollen lips were bruised and discoloured, and the needle—about four inches long and angled at the tip—hung down from her mouth on a length of thick, black thread. The stitching was crudely done, and Penrose could not even begin to imagine the pain; in truth, though, he didn't have to—the evidence of that was all too obvious in her eyes. Glazed and passive in death, and fixed on their merciless reflection, they nevertheless seemed to plead with him to call a halt to the torment; as he crouched down beside her, obscuring the line of vision between the body and its grotesque mirror image, he could almost believe that she was grateful.

Marjorie's hands were clasped together in her lap, but the red marks around her wrists suggested that they had, at some point, been tied together. There was a similar chafing to her neck, and the width of the mark seemed to match the tape measure which hung over the back of the chair. Penrose had
tried to prevent his mind from focusing on the stench of the body, but it was unavoidable; he would not know until the post mortem whether the incontinence was a result of some sort of toxic substance or purely of fear, but he would be surprised to find that Marjorie had not been incapacitated in some way. She was young and looked reasonably strong, but there was no sign of a struggle in the room: the work tables still stood in neat rows and the chairs and tailor's dummies remained upright and undamaged. The killer would have had ample time to tidy up, of course, but somehow Penrose did not think that was what had happened. No, he sensed something much more controlled and methodical in this determined violation of a young girl's body. He stood and looked around him at the fabrics and drawings, at the contrasts of colour and texture that filled the room. Death was always ugly, whether it came from a merciful bullet to the head or the sort of prolonged torture he saw here, but more often than not it confined itself to poorer districts and normal, even squalid, domesticity; the fact that it had been allowed to taint a place of beauty, that Marjorie had been disfigured in the most repellent way amid the trappings of class and fashion, seemed to him significant.