‘When she went to meet Roly from his office, yes,’ I said. ‘And presumably she met Roly through Aunt Foxy who was Tweetie’s introduction to the world of dancing, much to Sir Percy’s chagrin.’
‘That’s not really important,’ said Alec. ‘The point is I think Tweetie was invited to the office specifically to meet Julian,’ said Alec. ‘Roly – far from playing a dangerous game in dancing with his boss’s fiancée – actually provided a fiancée for his boss.’
‘A rich one, you mean?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Alec. ‘It wasn’t the money, no.’
‘Well what then?’ I asked. ‘And why would Julian pretend he didn’t know about the dancing?’
Alec sighed. ‘Tweetie wanted to dance. Julian wanted to marry a respectable young woman. I think the plan was for Julian to “find out” that Tweetie was not respectable – capering at the Locarno in the arms of another! – and for him to agree to go ahead anyway then hold his magnanimity over Tweetie for ever. In effect, to blackmail her into going ahead with the wedding – or staying in the marriage, depending on when he faced her – if she showed signs of not wanting to.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why wouldn’t she go ahead with it, or stay in it, having agreed to it? He clearly loves her. He was inconsolable that she broke it off. I’m perhaps being very stupid, but I really don’t see.’
‘He wasn’t inconsolable because she broke it off,’ Alec said. ‘She broke it off because he was inconsolable.’
‘About what?’ I said.
‘Really, Dan,’ said Alec, ‘how can you be such an innocent? About Roly, of course. About losing Roly.’
I was negotiating the busy junction on to the Great Western Road and it saved me from having to answer for a minute. For that reason, and that reason alone, I did not blurt out the opinion that no boss in the world glugs down half a bottle of whisky because one of his employees has died. Thankfully, waiting for an omnibus and a grocer’s cart with a very flighty pony to get out of the way, and then concentrating on getting across the tramlines, I had time to catch up and spare myself any guffaws.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see. The tears were all for Roly. Yes, I see. That’s why he turned pale green when he realised I was a detective.’ I finished executing the corner and shifted up a gear again. ‘So Roly procured a suitable bride,’ I said. 'But why would Roly – or Julian come to that – foresee her agreeing to a sham marriage? Why should she?’
‘Because she’s only concerned about two things,’ Alec said. ‘She’s a dancer and she’s a snob. If she married a suitable man for real he’d never let her keep dancing. If she married a man who would, she’d plummet down the social scale. This way she gets a position and a comfortable home and can keep dancing with clerks and baker boys.’
‘But what about …?’ I began. ‘What about … children?’
Alec snorted and I flushed.
‘Presumably Julian would turn a blind eye to however she got them. It really should have been a neat arrangement.’
‘But Roly and Julian grossly miscalculated Tweetie, didn’t they?’ I said. ‘And you are too. When she found out she was to be duped into a loveless marriage she broke it off that very day.’
‘I wonder how she did find out?’ said Alec.
‘Presumably she rang him up,’ I said. ‘He’ll be lucky if she doesn’t call the police. In fact, I’m very surprised that Sir Percy hasn’t insisted on calling them already.’
‘I am too, a little,’ said Alec. ‘One would expect a man of his sort to go harrumphing off to his golf chums covered in rectitude.’
‘Except that it would be rather embarrassing, wouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘Rather humiliating to admit that he was so roundly taken in.’
‘Or,’ said Alec, ‘and this is a very interesting possibility, Dan. Maybe Sir Percy doesn’t want the police looking too closely at the affair in its entirety.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, the truth about Lady Stott’s low relations – who they seem to have left behind them – would come out, and the truth about his daughter frequenting a dance-hall and associating with gangsters. Or even …’
‘The fact that his niece is an accessory to two murders?’ I said. ‘But he can’t possibly know that. If he knew it was Jeanne he would have thrown her out of the house and he wouldn’t have employed us.’
‘True,’ Alec said. ‘It must just be the embarrassment and the prospect of becoming a social pariah. No more hobnobbing with Lord Burrell and the Fiscal once that story got around.’
I grunted. Hugh is the gossip in our family and loves nothing more than sucking away at some morsel of another’s disgrace, he and George at his club like two old women in shawls on market day. I have never developed a taste for it. In fact, the accidental uncovering of other people’s shabby secrets is one of the least welcome corollaries of digging into crime.
‘Poor chap,’ said Alec presently.
‘Sir Percy?’ I said. I could not see it that way. He still had his wife and his daughter and his dignity and surely another suitor could not be long in coming.
‘I was thinking of Julian,’ Alec said.
‘You are kindness made flesh,’ I replied. ‘I could cheerfully smack him.’ Alec said nothing and even I could hear the briskness in my voice and decided to keep quiet rather than unleash any more of it. We are supposed, one always hears, to turn into our mothers but something had gone wrong with me. My mother grew more artistic and less worldly the older she got until at the end she was completely daffy. I sometimes thought I was turning into Nanny Palmer, who in her later years could fairly be called a battle-axe.
‘The question we must ask ourselves is this,’ Alec said, after we had turned off and were back in Partick, creeping along those tunnels of tenements, ‘was it one way or was it reciprocated? Julian and Roly, I mean.’
‘Reciprocated,’ I said, without even having to think. ‘If Roly hadn’t shared Julian’s …’
‘Proclivities?’ said Alec.
‘Ugh,’ I said. ‘I’ve always hated that word. It reeks of both sanctimony and glee and I can’t say which is worse. Let’s say Roly must have been in a similar predicament, otherwise Julian would have been opening himself up to all sorts of trouble. Blackmail, indeed.’
‘Very well then,’ Alec said. ‘I agree. Then the second question we must ask ourselves is this: was it Roly’s nature that got him killed?’
‘By whom?’ I said, as we finally drew into the kerb at Foxy’s tenement. ‘And if we’re entertaining that as a motive for Roly, where does that leave Leo?’
‘Leo was a young man, devoted to dancing, happy to marry a woman many years his senior,’ said Alec. ‘And they didn’t have any children, despite Foxy’s obvious maternal feelings, which instead she spent on her niece.’
‘Oh nonsense,’ I said. ‘Alec, she adored him.’
Alec only shrugged. ‘Let’s go up and see what she has to say on the matter,’ he said.
‘You can’t mean to ask her that.’
‘It’s the sort of question that might be better coming from another—’
‘Oh no,’ I told him, going as far as to wag my finger in his face. ‘You have inveigled me into many things over the years, darling, but not this one. And anyway, can you see Beryl and Jeanne banding together to murder two young men quite unconnected with either of them, simply because of their nature?’
Alec screwed up his face and squeezed shut his eyes, but after a minute he was forced to let his pent-up breath go and shake his head.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Unless it were some sort of obsession. Unless they were on a kind of crusade.’
‘A crusade?’ I said. ‘There’s nothing holy about poisoning people. I shouldn’t call it a crusade.’
‘I don’t suppose the crusaded ever find it that holy when it befalls them,’ Alec said, opening his door and stepping down. ‘Let’s go in. And if the conversation takes a turn in an opportune direction I shall
take care of the question myself and shall never berate you for not helping.’
Of course, this was a skilled move and I could only sigh. Now, he should have all the glory of asking the hellish question and all the extra glory of never casting it up to me. It was almost enough to make me try. But not quite, I thought, as I followed him.
26
It was a very different Foxy Trotter who opened the door to us today. Gone were the chandelier-like earrings, the silk wrap with the dragon on its back and the great confection of red hair piled above the painted face. Today she was the very picture of what Jeanne had called her: a respectable widowed woman living alone. Her hair was pinned in a bun, her face was bare and her clothes would not have been out of place at any of the city’s churches.
‘Oh!’ she said, making the word into a sigh of exhaustion. ‘It’s you again. Well, you can come in for I haven’t the strength to stop you but I can’t go answering a hundred questions because something’s happened and I’m tired out from it.’
‘We know,’ said Alec. ‘We were there.’
‘Roland dying is not even the half of it,’ said Foxy.
‘We’ve just come from your sister’s house, Mrs Munn,’ I said. ‘We know everything. But you mustn’t blame anyone because we worked out your part in the drama for ourselves without being told.’
She turned away from the door and walked back into the flat, leaving us to follow her. When we got to the kitchen door it was just in time to see her drop into her armchair and lean her head back.
‘So you know, do you?’ she said. ‘And are you come to take me away to the police station with you? I’m so tired I dare say I’d go.’
Since her eyes were shut she did not see the look that ricocheted between Alec and me. We had not meant to do it but somehow we had pulled off the oldest trick in the book. We had told her we knew everything and she had believed us. If we played our next hand very carefully we might yet make our claim come true.
‘I don’t see any reason for that,’ I said. ‘But we would like to hear your side of it, naturally.’
Alec nodded vigorously and urged me to carry on.
‘It was an accident,’ Foxy said.
‘Of course,’ Alec murmured. ‘We didn’t doubt that for a moment.’
‘The thing is,’ I went on gently, ‘that we don’t understand the reason for it. We’d be very glad to know why.’
‘Beryl,’ said Foxy, causing my heart to leap inside me. I saw Alec’s eyes light up too. It truly did seem as though if we sat there quietly and did not say anything foolish, we might be about to have the case solved for us. I could hardly breathe.
‘You know who she is, of course,’ Foxy went on. ‘Who her father is. And, you see, I knew we were going to win, Leo and me. I think Beryl knew it too and she kept on joking about fair play and how much it meant for her to go by the rules, win or lose. She even said once that she must be a disappointment to her father, throwing back in his face all he had worked for because she wanted to do it her own way.’
‘I see,’ I said, which was no more than the truth. It must have been a horrid prospect to think that one was going to win a competition and beat into second place the beloved only child of a ruthless man who might exact whatever revenge pleased him.
Foxy opened her eyes and lifted her head. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Do you?’
I nodded but wished she would close her eyes again for I was sure that Alec and I looked like startled fauns under her gaze.
‘But if we withdrew it would be as good as telling Beryl we were scared of her. And even if she won she wouldn’t have won fair and square. Then she might get angry enough to complain to her father and we’d be in trouble anyway. You don’t know this man, and if you’re lucky you don’t know anyone like him.’
‘We’ve met him,’ I said. ‘He seemed rather unassuming, and yet I know what you mean.’
‘He’s the quiet sort, right enough,’ Foxy said. ‘He doesn’t do his own dirty work, but by God it gets done.’
‘His quietness is more disturbing than a lot of bluster, if you ask me,’ said Alec.
‘And so I decided to take matters into my own hands,’ said Foxy. ‘To make it seem as if someone was threatening me and that was why I was withdrawing from the Champs. So Beryl would know it was nothing to do with her. If she saw the threats – and we made sure she did – then she’d never think twice about us leaving.’
‘You did it yourself,’ I said, unable to help it.
Once again, Foxy sat up and looked at me. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I thought you knew.’
I could only blink but Alec was quicker.
‘We had formed the opinion that it was Mr Munn,’ he said. I nodded dumbly. ‘Because of the fainting act.’
Foxy leaned all the way forward then and put her head in her hands, groaning. ‘It wasn’t an act,’ she said. ‘He really did faint. At least he passed out, if that’s different. We agreed on it together. We wanted it to be convincing. He tried to act a faint but it never looked right. So we used chloroform. Some in my headdress as if it was another prank like the fox and all that. And some extra in his hankie in case the stuff in the headdress didn’t work.’
It was no longer difficult to keep quiet; I could not have spoken for a pension. She had not only sent herself the notes and threats. She had actually killed her own husband. And with his foolish collusion. Alec’s face was the mirror of my own, eyes wide and mouth hanging open.
‘He was supposed to sink to the ground,’ said Foxy, ‘and we’d have to leave the floor and be disqualified. Then he’d go out and get some air and if anyone asked why he was so anxious we’d have the story of the threats. And if anyone suspected the chloroform we’d say it was put in my headdress by the threatener. We thought we were so clever, stories and back-up stories and everything. But I think I overdid the chloroform because he fainted again at the top of the stairs and oh! Oh, Leo!’
She fished out a handkerchief from her sleeve, buried her face in it and gave way to a storm of weeping. Alec eyed the kettle on the range and nodded at me. I sighed and got to my feet. I had never made tea in my life before I began detecting. That is to say, I had filled a little pot from a hot kettle on a tea-table but I had never worked a pump or a sink tap and boiled a great iron monster on a stove. I had never searched a kitchen for a packet of tea nor a cold larder for a bottle of milk. But since Gilver and Osborne opened its doors I had become a master. I could have donned a kimono and knelt before samurai. Alec, naturally, wanted nothing to do with this little sideline of the detecting life and after having once tasted his coffee I did not insist.
As to the weeping, I could dimly remember a time when it would have discomfited both of us. I should have squirmed and Alec should have left the room. Now it was barely noteworthy. I ignored it entirely and Alec stood by her chair patting her shoulder and shushing her absent-mindedly while he thought of other things.
‘Did he speak to you, Mrs Munn?’ he said at length. It sounded like solicitude but I knew better. Alec was gently trying to find out whether we could let well alone or whether honour required us to turn this revelation into an official report to the authorities.
‘He did,’ she said, raising her eyes and giving her nose a thorough blowing. ‘He begged me to take him home. Of course, I was adamant that he should go to the hospital but he was scared – well we both were – that the doctors would be able to tell, you know, and that we might get into trouble. Take me home and let me rest, Foxy, he said, and I-I-I’ll never forgive myself to the end of my days. I let him persuade me. I didn’t call for the doctor until I was sure it was out of his system. If I hadn’t listened he’d be here today and whether I was in the jail or not I couldn’t have cared less for he’d be here and walking around and going to the dogs and the dancing like he should be.’
‘Shush, shush,’ said Alec, with relief flooding his voice. ‘There, there now.’
‘I was going to call the doctor in the morning,’ Foxy went on.
The worst of the storm had subsided and she spoke musingly now, as though merely reminiscing. ‘I thought I’d let it all flush through, and then make sure he was well the next day. I never got the chance. Never even got the chance to say sorry. He slept like a baby right round the clock and while he was sleeping he just slipped away.’
‘Tea,’ I said, holding a cup and saucer close to her so that she had to reach out and take it from me. It was brusque but I feared that Alec was about to tell her what she clearly did not know: that after a bang on the head one should keep the patient awake, not watch him sleep like a baby. It was he who had told me, recounting a dreadful night in the trenches with a friend who, in the end, did not survive. ‘With some sugar to help bolster you up a bit,’ I went on.
We waited, sipping at our own cups of tea and just about managing not to grimace, for I had made it, with Foxy in mind, the colour of teak. When she began to revive a little I sat forward and, in my kindest voice, asked the crucial question.
‘Now Mrs Munn, what we must try to establish is who knew about what happened. Who knew enough to be copying it all again this year.’
‘No one knew what I did,’ she said. ‘No one. I’ve kept it locked away inside me for a whole year. You two are the first I’ve breathed a word to.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We didn’t mean that you had told the tru— That is, we didn’t mean to suggest that you had come cl—’
‘You mean, who heard my tall tales about the threats?’ said Foxy, with much less crippling nicety than I had been trying to juggle.
‘For a start,’ said Alec.
‘Beryl, of course,’ Foxy said. ‘It was her I was trying to convince. But there’s no secrets in a dance-hall and the others were around too. They were all kindness itself. Every one of them. And there was me making it look as if one of them was threatening me!’
She gulped and looked fair to begin another bout of grief and remorse.
‘So anyone might have copied the three threats,’ said Alec. ‘The next question is who might have copied the headdress. Forgive us pestering you, Mrs Munn, but it’s still hard to see how Beryl could have brought about a second one of just the right design and construction.’
Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Page 25