“To Bert!”
“To Bert!” Glasses chinked around the table at Ye Olde Cock Tavern, the favourite watering hole of the Globe staff.
“Bert Isaacs. The best political correspondent I’ve ever worked with. Either side of the pond.” Rollo downed his whisky, thumped down his glass and wiped his hand decisively over his mouth. “It’s a crying shame.”
“Will someone tell his family?” Poppy asked Mavis Bradshaw, who sat beside her – the only other woman among the pack of newspapermen who had come to drink to the memory of their late colleague.
“I don’t think he had any,” said Mavis sadly.
“He didn’t,” confirmed Rollo. “Married to the job.” He poured himself another drink and offered to top up Poppy’s. Poppy, who had only taken a sip of the whisky to be polite, covered the glass with her hand. Rollo grunted, but didn’t seem to take offence. “Don’t worry, Miz Denby. We’ll do him right. We’re family at The Globe.” He raised his glass again. “To family!”
“To family!” came the slightly slurred chorus.
Daniel came through the door carrying his camera. Rollo poured him a drink and pushed it across the table to meet him. Daniel swigged it back in one gulp and sat in the vacant seat next to Poppy.
“They finished with you?” asked Rollo.
“For now. They asked me to take some photographs for them. Their fella’s on holiday.”
“All right for some,” muttered one of the hacks.
“What of?” asked Rollo.
“The body from different angles – obviously – the staircase, the broken balustrade –”
“Why the hell didn’t I get that fixed?” muttered Rollo, shaking his red head.
Daniel patted him on the shoulder. “You did your best, Rollo. It’s not your fault the repairman couldn’t come earlier.”
Rollo glared at him under his shaggy brows. “He was coming tomorrow. One more day and Bert would still be alive.”
“The police think it was an accident,” interjected Daniel, happy to distract Rollo from his self-recrimination. “But there’ll be a formal inquest.”
“They told me that too,” agreed Rollo.
That’s what they’d told everyone. Mavis’s screams had summoned men from every room in the building. Daniel was first on the scene, leaping down the stairs two at a time. He pushed past Poppy, who was fixed to the spot, unable to tear her eyes away from the broken body of the man she had only just met a few hours before. Not wanting to look at his head with the crushed skull and contorted face, she stared at his white shirt with the old food stains and then at his trousers, which no one had bothered to tell him were not properly done up.
Daniel confirmed quickly that Bert was dead and asked Mavis to call the police. As she did, journalists, printers, ad-men and bookkeepers filled the foyer. Poppy allowed herself to be pushed to the back of the crowd. This was not the first time she had seen a dead body – she had helped her mother at a military convalescent home during the war, and she had seen her fair share of dead, dying and grotesquely mutilated men; but it was the first time someone had literally dropped dead in front of her.
When Rollo arrived in the lift – his legs too short to sprint down the stairs the way Daniel had – he took over, leaving the photographer to find Poppy and ask if she was all right. He asked her what she had seen. She told him. Then later she told the police as they interviewed everyone in the building one at a time. As each person was released they went to the pub and waited for the rest of their colleagues.
Mavis had been interviewed just before Poppy. She had the most to contribute. It seemed that she was the last person to see the political correspondent alive. A few minutes before Poppy had arrived, a man came to deliver an envelope addressed to Bert. No, Mavis did not know the man. No, she did not see whether he arrived on foot or by vehicle. No, there was no return address on the envelope. She had called Bert on the interior telephone and he had come down in the lift to collect it. He read the note in front of her, raised his eyebrows in what Mavis described as surprise, then confided that he was thinking of going on a diet. She had teased him that he should be taking the stairs then, not the lift. At this she started crying. “It’s my fault! If he’d gone back up in the lift this would never have happened.”
The note was found under his body. It was written on very fine paper and had unfortunately soaked up so much blood that the ink was now illegible. The police said they might find out what it said when the blood dried, but they were not hopeful.
The clock above the bar said nine o’clock. It was time Poppy got home, or Aunt Dot and Grace would be worried about her. She had almost forgotten about the theatre story. Should she still write it up, she wondered? Rollo looked more than half drunk and she wasn’t sure if she would get a coherent answer out of him. She was wrong.
“You got something for us then, Poppy?”
“Yes. But I still need to write it up.”
“Too late for tomorrow. Won’t get set in time. But write it up in the morning; I’ll have a look at it and if it’s any good, we can set it for the next day. I’ll have a go piecing together Bert’s notes, but we’ll still need more copy…” He continued, musing away to himself and anyone who would listen about how he was going to juggle the next couple of editions without Bert’s contributions. Poppy marvelled at the editor’s ability to separate his emotions from the job at hand. Bert, she assumed, was a friend of Rollo’s, yet sentiment would not get in the way of the story. It was a hard world Poppy was entering, this world of journalism. She wondered how she would cope if someone close to her became tomorrow’s news. Would it simply be business as usual? Rollo continued to plan the week’s papers out loud. Poppy assumed he was finished with her, so she stood up to leave.
“If you don’t mind, Mr Rolandson, I need to get home.”
Daniel stood up and helped her into her coat. “I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”
As they were leaving, Rollo called after them, “What’s your angle?”
“My angle?”
“The theatre story, Miz Denby.”
“Well, I spoke to Mr Atkins –”
“Robert Atkins?”
“Yes. Turns out he acted with my aunt. The most enchanting Titania he’s ever seen, he said.”
Rollo’s drunk eyes slowly came into focus. He looked at Poppy intently. “Denby. Dotty Denby? Don’t tell me you’re related to one of the most infamous suffragettes of the last decade?” He accentuated his last word with a sweep of his over-large hands, knocking over bottles and glasses.
“Er – yes. Dorothy Denby is my aunt.”
“There is a God!” cried Rollo. “Miz Denby, be in my office at eight o’clock on the dot. Not a minute later. And Danny Boy, you be there too.”
Daniel and Poppy walked quietly down Fleet Street, past the walkway to St Bride’s Church and half a dozen or so printers, publishers and newspaper offices interspersed between more pubs and taverns, some of which had been there from before Samuel Pepys first started writing his diary in 1660. They passed the pub where Charles Dickens had written much of The Pickwick Papers when he worked on Fleet Street as a journalist. Then they arrived at the bus stop. Light and laughter spilled from the taverns onto the street, but Poppy and Daniel were in a sombre mood.
“Are you all right, Poppy? After your shock?”
“I am Mr – Daniel – thank you for asking. Not the best thing to happen on a first day though.” She forced a smile.
“Indeed.”
“Do you think it was an accident?” Poppy asked.
“Of course. What else could it be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Call me silly if you will, but I just have this feeling… Don’t you think it was strange that he fell to his death moments after receiving a mysterious letter?”
Daniel laughed, despite the sombre mood. “I think you have been reading too much of that lady mystery writer, Miss Denby.”
Poppy flushed. Perhaps he was right. Of course he was
right. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. “Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that it wasn’t an accident.”
“Poppy…”
“Oh, come on. Humour me.”
Daniel craned his neck down the street, then looked at his pocket watch. “All right. Just until the bus comes. So, if it wasn’t an accident he must have been pushed.”
“Exactly.”
“Well that, my learned friend, is where your case ends. There was no one on the stairs or on the landing with Bert. If there was, Mavis would have seen them. And I would have seen them when I heard her scream. They would have been running up or down the stairs either to get away or to pretend they were part of the crowd flocking to see what had happened. I was the first there. It was on the second floor. Just outside the art and photography department. I didn’t see anyone.”
Poppy absorbed this information and reassessed the situation. “What about the lift?”
“What about it?”
“Did you look in it?”
“Of course not. When I heard the screams I ran out of the department onto the landing, saw the broken balustrade and assumed the worst. I ran down the stairs immediately.”
“So you didn’t check the lift.”
“No, I didn’t check the lift.”
“And we know that the lift went up to the fourth floor.”
“How do we know that?”
“Because Rollo came down in it.”
Daniel looked at her quizzically, a slight smile on his face. “Oh, very good, Miss Denby.”
Poppy flushed, then immediately felt guilty for feeling so happy discussing the tragic death of an innocent man. But Daniel seemed to be going with the flow.
“So feasibly, someone could have got off the lift on the third floor before it got up to Rollo.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about this.” Poppy shook her head. “You were right in the first place. It’s disrespectful playing this sort of game.”
Daniel took her by the shoulders and turned her to him, looking intently into her eyes. “Not if it helps to find Bert’s killer.”
“If there was one.”
“Yes, if there was one. But whether there was or there wasn’t, Bert would want us to get to the bottom of the story.”
“I suppose he would.”
Daniel checked his watch again. “Do me a favour though: don’t mention anything to Rollo just yet. He might think you’re overstepping the mark. I’ll ask him if he saw anyone coming out of the lift. And I’ll ask on the third floor too. That’s where we keep the morgue.” He laughed at Poppy’s raised eyebrows. “Where we keep our archive of old editions and research files.”
“When will you ask him?”
“Tomorrow. After our meeting.”
Poppy suddenly remembered the summons to Rollo’s office in the morning, and despite the tragic circumstances of the day couldn’t help a surge of hope rising in her. “What do you think it’s about?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s to do with the story Bert was working on before he died. It had some kind of suffragette, women’s rights angle, and Rollo got excited when he heard who your aunt was. So he may want to use your connections in that area to flesh out the story.”
“Golly, and I thought I was just going to tidy his office.”
“The day Rollo’s office gets tidied will be the day he dies.”
Headlights flashed as a bus turned the corner at the bottom of the street.
“An unfortunate turn of phrase, Mr Rokeby.”
“A slip of the tongue, Miss Denby. Goodnight. Travel safely.”
CHAPTER 8
Elizabeth awoke with the strangest feeling, one so alien she almost didn’t recognize it. But as she turned over and looked towards the barred window, the first rays of sun pushing through, she felt it wash over her – the possibility that she could soon be free; the hope that she had a future.
She wondered how long it would take the journalist to notify the police and for them to come and free her. Surely not long. But perhaps he might want to see her himself first. Or send someone else to do it. The last time he’d come had not been so successful, after all. It had been about a month ago, just before the last visit by the window cleaner, and she had heard a commotion in the hall outside her locked door. She had crawled along the floor so she wouldn’t be seen through the glass panel and pressed her ear to the keyhole. She heard a man’s voice claiming to have been given permission to see her. The nurse on duty said she needed to speak to her superior before she could let him in. Elizabeth knew that meant she would have to telephone him. The man appeared to assume the same and told the nurse that he in fact had been the one who had given permission in the first place, and offered to make the telephone call himself. Elizabeth could not hear what the nurse said in response, but she assumed it must have been positive because she heard them walking towards her door.
She retreated to her bed, lest they realize she’d been listening, and waited to hear the key turn in the lock. But just as she saw the outline of a large man in the glass pane she heard another man shout.
“What are you doing here? Step away from that door.”
“He’s here to see Elizabeth Dorchester, doctor. He says he’s a solicitor. He has permission.”
“Solicitor, my eye! He’s a reporter. Aren’t you? We met at the Marie Curie fundraiser at Great Ormond Street. Abrahams, isn’t it?”
“Isaacs,” said the journalist, sounding completely unrepentant. “From The Globe. What have you got to hide here, doctor? Why is this woman locked up? Has someone paid you to do it?”
“Elizabeth Dorchester is a very sick woman and that is as much as I can tell you. Patient confidentiality, Mr Isaacs – surely even a yellow journalist like yourself has heard of that.”
Isaacs’ reply was stifled by what Elizabeth assumed was the arrival of some muscle to escort him away. She lay on the bed and listened until she heard the last door slam. And then she cried. She was desperate to make contact with another human being – a sympathetic human being; someone who might see her as she really was, not the fiction created by her medical file.
When she stopped crying she started to think. Why was this Isaacs coming to see her? How had he heard about her? She wondered if it had something to do with him. He’d always been newsworthy, never out of the pages of The Times for long, and would give social engagements guaranteed to attract press photographers’ attention preference over other less glamorous occasions. He had also paraded her in front of the press when she was a young and beautiful debutante; but all that changed when she managed to get herself onto the front page of The Times all by herself – chained to the railings of number 10 Downing Street. He had been appalled and attempted to have her locked up, claiming she must be mentally deranged. He hired three different psychiatrists to testify to her instability in front of a judge. But the judge did not accept it and dismissed the case. That time.
Elizabeth no longer knew what he was up to out there in the world, but she doubted he was any less prominent than he was before the war; before he’d finally succeeded in having her sectioned under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act after that most terrible of affairs.
Elizabeth shook her head. She did not want to think about that now. She did not want images of feeding tubes and tortured women filling her waking hours as they filled her dreams. She did not want to see the broken body of her friend on a railway line. She tried to sink back into that elusive feeling she had glimpsed when she awoke, but it was fading fast. Mr Isaacs from The Globe had better do something quickly, because if he didn’t there was only one course of action left to her. She closed her eyes and started to wander down the well-worn paths of fantasy in which she worked out the intricacies of her Plan B – her suicide plan. Please hurry, Mr Isaacs; please hurry.
When Poppy arrived in Rollo Rolandson’s office at 8 a.m. sharp, she found him staring moodily into a cup of thick black coffee, wearing the same shirt,
bow-tie and braces as the previous night. Poppy doubted he’d had a wink of sleep.
“Miz Denby,” he growled, and motioned for her to sit. “Dan will join us in a minute. He’s just sorting out his equipment.”
Poppy looked around at the piles of files in danger of crushing the diminutive editor at any moment. “Do you want me to get started on the clean-up?”
Bleary-eyed, Rollo looked up from his coffee, his unshaven top lip glistening with droplets of the brew. “Later. Got something for you to do first. You and Dan. Your aunt is Dotty Denby, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And has she ever mentioned a Melvyn Dorchester to you?”
Poppy thought for a moment. Dorchester. Melvyn Dorchester. No, she couldn’t say she had. But then suddenly Poppy remembered her aunt slamming down The Globe newspaper a week or so ago and clattering the tea tray. Grace had looked up from the accounts she was doing on the other side of the room. She had asked what was wrong.
“The Dorkmeister!” Dot declared. “Lord snake-in-the-grass Dorchester. Who would have thought that Curie woman would fall for it?”
“Perhaps you should speak to Marjorie Reynolds about it,” Grace mumbled before returning to a column of figures.
“Perhaps I shall,” Dot had fumed. When Poppy asked her about it she said she would tell her later. She didn’t want to give herself indigestion so late in the afternoon. But she had never got around to telling her. Poppy told Rollo what had happened.
“Good. Just what we need. You can get the details from her later, Poppy. And see if she’s prepared to be quoted. For now, all you need to know is in here.” He pushed a file across the desk. “The highlights are: Lord Melvyn Dorchester, Tory peer and business tycoon, was a very vocal opponent of the women’s suffrage movement before the war. There were even suggestions that he put pressure on the Home Office to get the police to use strong-arm tactics on some of the women.”
The Jazz Files Page 6