‘No, I don’t suppose I would.’
‘So I don’t believe you wrote those notes, but maybe I’m wrong. After all, you’ve lied to me about something else this evening.’
‘What was that?’
‘You said you weren’t in touch with Brian Langley. But I know for a fact that you were. Quite recently, as it happens. I saw a letter from you, to him, in his study. He’d left it there, on his desk, open. Unguarded.’
Pamela Hanro gasped and her face flushed crimson with anger and embarrassment, but she didn’t deny it. And then her response completely surprised Posie.
‘Unguarded? It was open? For all to look at?’
‘Oh, don’t worry. No-one could see it,’ Posie assured her. ‘He has no real staff, you see. Just the Housekeeper, really.’
The crimson flush diffused just a little, but the chin was drawn up again and Pamela’s fingers plucked against the violent pink of her brocade gown. Any friendliness in the woman’s manner was now gone.
‘So do you have a connection with Brian Langley, Miss Hanro? I’m sure you do: just as I’m sure that that expensive and beautiful yellow orchid over there must be a present from him to you. And those white roses were probably a gift, too. So what is the connection between you? Are you lovers?’
‘Certainly not.’ The tone was prim, but almost wistful.
‘So what is it?’
But the woman simply shook her head, refusing to answer.
‘It’s of no importance to you, Miss Parker. And it’s of no relevance to this case. Whatsoever.’
Pamela was retreating into the room already. ‘Good night to you, Miss Parker, and please don’t bother to pass on any message to my sister. There’s nothing to be said.’
And with that, Pamela Hanro shut the door.
****
Fourteen
Posie munched away on her fish and chips, loitering in the hot shadows of an awning. At her feet were her carpet bag and a spare fish and chip supper which she had bought for Mr Minks, the office cat.
Under the awning it smelt like a sweaty tent, and the mingled scents of melting pavement tarmac and fried fish ran high. But the location for her meal was no coincidence; Posie was standing directly opposite Tacy’s, with a full view of Number 15, where Pamela lived.
The long queue had now dispersed and Bute Street had become quiet, a shimmering haze of dust. Posie had decided to linger on as something had made her curious and she felt a real need to get at the truth. But she didn’t know why exactly.
She had, however, kept her eyes trained on the windows of the upper-floor flat of Number 15 for a little while now.
She was just finishing, licking at greasy fingers and scrunching up her newspaper wrapper when she saw a ripple of movement in the very window she had been focused on. Posie stayed in the shadows, watching. And there it was again. Posie stared.
And stared.
A child’s face, her nose pushed up tight against the glass of the grimy window. Peering out from behind the yellow orchid. An anxious, worried little face, somehow.
A familiar face.
And then suddenly Posie understood. She understood everything. Everything about Pamela Hanro made sense.
‘Yikes.’
Posie exhaled. She stood, frozen, and then the little girl disappeared. Then there was a flutter of pink and a glimpse of Pamela Hanro’s dark, shrewd face and for just a second her eyes roamed the length of Bute Street and then met Posie’s and widened in horror. The two women stared at each other, Posie’s heart hammering violently in her chest, her breath coming fast. Pamela Hanro disappeared.
Posie stepped out of the shadows into the brightness of the street and ripped out a piece of thin paper from her notebook. She started to write quickly, her greasy fingers staining the paper. And then she crossed the road and rang the doorbell of Number 15 again.
Posie waited at the blue door, unsure or not as to whether it would be answered this time. But after a couple of minutes she heard running steps in the hallway.
‘So?’ Pamela’s face was suffused with a vivid anger, caught out.
‘I don’t want to bother you. But please, for my own understanding, tell me if I’m correct. And I promise, this won’t go any further.’
Posie passed across the note, and Pamela Hanro snatched it up as if it could catch fire. She read what Posie had written there:
SILVIA DOESN’T KNOW, DOES SHE?
BUT BRIAN DOES.
Posie studied the woman’s face, all the while seeking to understand, but mainly trying to reassure. She failed spectacularly.
‘Blast you and your interfering ways,’ hissed Pamela Hanro. She crumpled the note and thrust the greasy paper into a sleeve of her elaborate pink dress.
‘Maybe I misjudged you, Miss Parker; told you too much. I thought you were a decent sort. Nice, even. But that’s enough now; I’ll not tell you anymore. I’ve nothing more to give you. Go away and leave us be.’
Posie was stunned, but she saw the fear shadowing the girl’s face. She held her hands out apologetically.
‘I can assure you I have no desire to cause trouble, or take anything from you. What you did was good; it was kind…’
But she was cut off.
‘I might have been a troublemaker in my youth, but that was a long time ago now. I’m a mother first and foremost. And there was nothing kind about me adopting Hilda: she’s my life. My Hilda’s all the family I’ve got.’
And then the door was slammed firmly shut.
As she left, Posie saw a beaky spectacled face peering out from the first-floor flat of Number 15. And above, curtains now shut tight, a yellow orchid rammed unforgivingly close to the glass of the window.
Suffocatingly close.
****
The heat got worse the higher you climbed up the building on Grape Street where Posie’s Detective Agency was housed, despite the shady narrowness of the little street and the trees outside. By the time she reached the top floor, Posie was covered in sweat and feeling decidedly unglamorous.
As she opened the glass-stencilled door to the office, the heat inside hit her like a wall. The place smelt like burning carpets and she raced in, opening all the windows in the waiting room and dashing through and opening the window in her office, and in Len’s. She hurried to the kitchen at the back, and hauled up the tiny sash window there, causing a tiny waft of stale hot air to enter. She moved aside the tatty red velvet curtains she had installed a few years earlier for Mr Minks to climb on.
In truth, they weren’t really needed anymore. She had brought Mr Minks in a basket down on a train to London when her father, the Reverend Parker, had died unexpectedly in 1919, leaving Posie almost penniless and without anything much to call her own, least of all a family.
Mr Minks was her father’s beloved cream-and-brown Siamese, and he had been spoiled rotten by the vicar on a daily basis, having the run of the Norfolk Rectory Posie had called home. But when it had come to it, Posie was all Mr Minks had, and he was all she had. Initially, he had been forced to live in her office, her first landlady having an aversion to animals, but Mr Minks had liked it at Grape Street, and had refused to move on.
He was an old cat now, and his curtain-climbing days were almost behind him. He hadn’t even bothered to greet Posie tonight; he was too hot and bothered. But he suddenly caught a whiff of the now-cold fish supper and he purred and rubbed at Posie’s leg as she fetched a plate and undid the newspaper.
‘Good grief, Len! Don’t bother next time!’
Posie moved aside a tin of sardines in a brightly-coloured tomato sauce which Len had left out for the cat, the tin lid jagged and bent back, at a dangerous angle for anyone to encounter, human or feline.
‘Good job you don’t like tinned sardines, eh, Mr Minks?’
But now the cat ignored her, intent on wolfing down his food. Posie sighed and went through into the main office.
The place looked okay, to be honest, but it wasn’t up to the usual standards
kept by her permanent secretary, Prudence Smythe. It looked like a slummy girl’s bedroom: there were bits and pieces everywhere, out of place. Her recent and unread copy of the new Agatha Christie bestseller The Murder on the Links was on the floor by the secretary’s desk, obviously being ‘borrowed’ without Posie’s consent, a cheap bookmark stuffed halfway through. Posie gave a sniff of irritation.
Her aborted effort at a grey jumper for Alaric was still lying sadly beside the desk, and this irritated her beyond belief. Dolly’s magazine, The Lady, was also lying around from earlier. Good job that it was high summer and that no clients would come and call out of the blue.
Checking the top of the secretary’s desk, Posie saw there was a postcard in cheap gaudy yellows and blues from Prudence, and an unopened letter with Posie’s name on the front of it.
She slit the letter open and perched there on the desk, kicking her yellow suede shoes off. The letter was an invitation to a Christmas Eve party from someone she had met at Maypole Manor, in Kent, the previous year, as 1921 had slid unhappily into 1922. She had liked the person and stayed in touch sporadically. Posie smiled in amusement and placed the invite carefully aside in the metal mesh ‘FILING’ tray: the location was intriguing and the invitee was equally someone who would have a good many stories to tell over a roaring Christmas fire.
‘Interesting.’
But it would have to wait: there was Alaric to consult, of course, and besides, Christmas seemed such a long way off.
Just as she was shifting herself from the desk, the telephone rang.
‘Yes?’ She scowled into the receiver, checking her wristwatch. It was seven-thirty. At least she had plenty of time before meeting the Chief Inspector.
‘The Royal Oak pub, Madam, in Isleworth,’ the Operator said primly. ‘Do you want to take the call, Madam? Shall I make the connection?’
‘The Royal Oak?’ Posie’s mind scrambled.
She remembered Reggie Jones telling her about how the extras and some of the crew would take off there for a bite to eat, usually sausage sandwiches, leaving the more important members of the film crew to their canteen dinners.
So who was this calling her? Someone unknown who had realised who she was, and had some snippet of advice or information about the death threats? Or else someone who couldn’t rely on the privacy of the telephone at Worton Hall and had sneaked off to the nearest telephone hoping not to be overheard?
‘Fine. Put the call through.’
‘Two minutes, Madam.’
Posie grabbed at a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk, idly bundling up the grey mass of wool at the same time. She threw it into the bin and missed.
‘Blast!’
She picked up the copy of The Lady, its front page emblazoned with yet another wedding portrait of the unutterably beautiful Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
WEDDING SPECIAL! screamed this particular cover in a predictable variation on a theme.
Posie was suddenly reminded of the cuttings of the Duchess in her bridal attire up in the cook’s room at Worton Hall. She studied the cover again. Would the cook appreciate it if she took it with her to Worton Hall tomorrow? As extra material for the scrapbook? It was a lovely picture at any rate: the Duchess was dreamily serene, wearing her wedding dress and wrapped up in furs against the April chill. Stuffing the magazine tightly into her carpet bag Posie was again plagued by some sort of misgivings about the cook, about something which wasn’t quite right.
Just then the Operator announced the connection. There was a sudden rush of whispering and whirring down the line. The voice when it came sounded very far off.
‘Posie? Hullo?’
‘Who is this?’
‘Don’t you recognise my voice?’
The whirring continued, more than before. Posie suddenly realised it must be Silvia Hanro, although the voice sounded only a tiny bit like hers. She seemed to be whispering. Posie remembered Tom telling her that the couple maintained a fake name at their address in town.
‘I say. Is that Mrs Delacroix?’
A slight laugh could be heard amid the howls and rasps. ‘That’s right. It’s me.’
‘I must warn you, Mrs Delacroix, I don’t think this is a very secure line, at my end, I mean. You might be being listened in on. I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t speak unless in person? Otherwise why was there all that cloak-and-dagger stuff before?’
‘Well, I’m not exactly in my usual place, am I? Who would know to listen in on this call? They’d have to be mightily clever to do that. I’m sure it’s fine. Brian doesn’t know I’m here. Tom doesn’t, either, although I left him a note to say I’d gone out and would be a while. No-one knows who I am. I’ve come in disguise. It’s a wonderfully liberating feeling, people not recognising you. I feel completely free. It’s delicious! I’m sitting in the lounge bar drinking milk and soda.’
‘Well, how can I help you?’
‘I couldn’t speak to you earlier, when Robbie and I were sitting outside the studio. I felt awful just ignoring you like that. And then I found you’d taken off and gone. Why did you have to leave so soon?’
‘There wasn’t much more I could do there, to be honest. I wanted to see if I could find out a bit extra in town.’
‘Oh, yes? And did you?’ The whispering voice was eager, almost desperate. Oh yes, Posie thought to herself.
I found out a good deal.
Just then Posie was almost drowned out by a wave of crackling, and she held the receiver away from her ear for a bit.
‘I’m making a good start,’ she assured the movie star. ‘I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. I’ll be with you first thing. Don’t worry. Are you finished for the day?’
‘Oh yes. It’s a relatively early night for us. Brian’s busy in the cutting room so we all get a break until tomorrow. We’ll start again at nine o’clock sharp for any last bits and pieces which might be needed. Your pal Dolly left here with Bertie Samuelson’s driver, by the way. I saw her leave about half an hour ago. Jolly good sport, isn’t she? Especially given Brian’s sharp tongue; she seems to take it all in her stride, though.’
Posie felt a stab of relief, and guilt. She had actually forgotten all about Dolly until now. At least she was homeward-bound with the reliable Fred, who was certainly earning his shilling’s worth from Bertie Samuelson today. ‘She is a good sport. And thank you for letting me know.’
‘See you tomorrow then. And thanks awfully.’ The pips went amidst a blur of whirring noises and Silvia Hanro rang off.
Posie went through into her own office, shutting the door gently behind her.
What she had said wasn’t quite true, actually. She wouldn’t be telling Silvia Hanro what she had found out today. Not at all.
It wasn’t her place to.
****
Fifteen
Posie stood by her office window looking out at the view, at the dirty, tall grey buildings which were just blank backs, where the only signs of life were the pigeons who circled around and around beneath the sliver of hot, clear blue evening sky.
Strangely enough, Posie loved this view of offices which others might have found claustrophobic, or depressing, even. It reminded her of her own independence, of what she had achieved, of her love for London.
Most of the office workers would now be at home, eating dinner. Not Posie. But then, she wasn’t most people.
‘Lucky blighters,’ she muttered to herself half-seriously. She had a busy night’s work ahead of her, and one which demanded a change of clothes.
She slipped gratefully out of her dusty yellow outfit and kicked off her stockings, now grimy with London soot. Opening the locked cupboard nearest her desk, she brought out her emergency change of clothes and her stash of make-up, which in days gone by Len Irving would have called her ‘glamour-attack’.
But those times were definitely now past: the ‘glamour attack’ had been an embellished short black dress, complete with sequins and feathers and trimmings, daring in its hem length
and neckline. Now that Posie was richer, older, wiser and perhaps – even if she didn’t like to admit it, fatter – the ‘glamour attack’ had been replaced by a plain black House of Harlow dress. It was cut beautifully and on the bias, serviceable for both day and eveningwear.
Posie had longed for this handy dress on countless occasions today.
She tugged it on over her head and immediately felt better, inconspicuous, but beautiful, too. A squirt of Parma Violet and a dash of pink lipstick completed the change and she sunk with a sense of relief into her desk chair. She tugged her hands through her very short shingled brown hair and then sat, thinking nineteen to the dozen.
She thought of the movie star she had just spoken to.
Silvia Hanro wasn’t done for the night either. Even now she was probably still sitting incognito, alone, drinking her milk and soda in a pub, pretending to be someone else. Not that that would be difficult for the girl: she pretended to be someone else day in, day out, and got paid for it.
Posie thought through the implications of what she had found out on Bute Street. How things were stitching themselves together.
She had discovered, quite by accident, a web of secrets and dark histories which had been imperfectly hidden. The question was, was there enough of a motive among all that mess for threatening Silvia Hanro with murder?
Posie thought again of the small face at the window of Number 15, Bute Street.
Hilda Hanro.
Posie smiled sadly to herself. ‘A child with two mothers, both in the same picture. Which the child looks at every single day without realising.’
The girl who had looked out of the window had had Silvia Hanro’s saucer-like eyes and golden hair, and had been reminiscent of the elder child in the painting by John Singer Sargent. But the wide face, although similar to the movie star’s, bore more of a resemblance to Brian Langley’s. There was no mistaking it: her anxious expression was his alone.
Murder of a Movie Star Page 14