Death in Berlin: A Mystery

by M. M. Kaye

  Stella’s face was suddenly white. ‘Robert! You don’t mean—you don’t really think—’

  ‘Of course not, darling. It was only a weak attempt at humour. All the same, I’d rather you both laid off wandering around after dark—for the sake of your nerves if nothing else. Did you find your bag, ’Randa?’

  ‘No. I turned on the dashboard light and hunted around, but—’

  ‘I took it in,’ interrupted Stella. ‘I meant to tell you, only Robert and his soup put it out of my head. It’s in the drawing-room.’

  ‘That’s a relief. It’s got my only lipstick in it—which accounts for my rather pallid appearance at the moment.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Robert, turning to look at her. ‘If you did but know it, Miranda my pet, yours is one of the few faces that looks better the less you do to it. It’s the planes or something. I suppose that’s why you photograph so well. As for lipstick, you don’t need any. You have a mouth like that plummy pre-Raphaelite female in the Tate Gallery—Mona something. The one dressed up in a pair of brocade curtains and ropes of red beads, clutching a hideous feather fan.’

  ‘Robert, this is most unexpected of you!’ said Miranda, surprised. ‘I’d no idea you frequented the Tate!’

  ‘I don’t,’ admitted Robert, clearing away the soup plates and proceeding to carve cold mutton: ‘The comparison is not my own. I was idly gazing at a reproduction of the masterpiece in question “courtesy of the Tate”, on the cover of some arty-crafty publication at Katy Lawrence’s on Sunday, and happened to mention that the damsel reminded me dimly of someone. It was your friend Lang who remarked that she had your mouth. And how right he was! She has.’

  Miranda coloured and Stella looked at her sharply, but forebore to comment.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Robert handing round the mutton, ‘how was it that you knew that chap’s telephone number, young ’Randa? I gather you rang him up and yelled for help.’

  ‘He gave me his number,’ said Miranda shortly, angrily conscious of her heightened colour.

  Robert lifted an amused and mocking eyebrow. ‘And carried it about clutched in one hand ever after, I suppose?’

  ‘No,’ said Miranda coldly. ‘I didn’t need to. I’ve got a freak memory for numbers. If I’ve seen them written down, I can visualize them again as if I was looking at a photograph.’

  ‘Oh damn!’ interrupted Stella. ‘Now I’ve spilt the mayonnaise! Quick Robert, get me a cloth from the kitchen!’

  In the ensuing tumult Simon Lang was forgotten, and Miranda, profoundly grateful for Stella’s timely interruption, hastened to change the subject.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘Where’s Mademoiselle?’ inquired Robert, stacking dirty plates in the serving-hatch. ‘Is she having supper with the Lawrences? I thought she was supposed to eat here.’

  ‘So she is,’ said Stella. ‘I hope you’ve left her some soup.’

  ‘Not a drop—unless she cares to scrape some off the linoleum. But there’s any amount of cold mutton and salad left.’

  Stella looked at the clock and frowned. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ she said in a troubled voice; ‘I’d no idea it was as late as that! She must be back by now. She’s probably in the kitchen.’

  ‘No she isn’t,’ reported Robert, peering through the hatch.

  ‘Then I think I’ll just run up and see if she’s in her room. You know how she sulks sometimes.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Miranda. ‘You put your feet up on the sofa while Robert brews some coffee. You look all in.’

  Miranda tapped on Mademoiselle’s door, and receiving no answer turned the handle and went in. The room was in darkness and she turned on the light and stood looking about her curiously. It was meticulously neat; the bedcover drawn smoothly and without a wrinkle and the dressing-table almost bare—a severely utilitarian hairbrush and comb, a solid pin-cushion and a small box of hairpins being all that lay upon it. There were no photographs or any form of personal souvenirs, and it might have been a hotel bedroom for all the impression that its owner’s personality had left upon it.

  Miranda switched off the light and went downstairs again. ‘She’s not there,’ she reported.

  ‘I think perhaps I’d better ring up the Lawrences’,’ said Stella anxiously.

  But Mademoiselle was not at the Lawrences’. She had not returned there and Lottie had eventually gone to sleep without Rollerbear.

  ‘Damn the woman!’ said Robert crossly. ‘I suppose she’s punctured a tyre or something of the sort, and hasn’t got the sense to ring up and let us know. I suppose I’d better go out and hunt her up.’

  He collected a coat from the hall and went off to the garage; to return an hour later, but without Mademoiselle. The German sentries on the Stadium’s gates had been changed about the time she would have left, and the ones now on duty and no recollection of seeing any woman on a bicycle. ‘She’s probably met a pal, or gone off to some lecture,’ said Robert irritably. ‘After all, there’s no particular reason why she should come home early now that Lottie isn’t here. She’s probably going to seize the opportunity and take every evening off!’

  ‘But Rollerbear!’ said Stella unhappily. ‘She knows how Lottie feels about that creature. Surely she would—Robert don’t you think we should do something?’

  ‘Such as what?’ inquired Robert shortly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Stella helplessly. ‘Ring up the hospital perhaps. She might have had an accident or—or something.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Robert crisply. ‘We should have heard soon enough if anything like that had happened. No, the blighted woman has undoubtedly gone on the toot for the evening. We’ll leave the front door unlocked and she can let herself in. And I hope you’ll rub it into her tomorrow that the next time she takes an impromptu evening off she rings up first!’

  But in the morning Mademoiselle’s room was still empty and her bed had not been slept in, though the coverlet was rumpled as though someone had sat on it. Her brush and comb, toothbrush and nightdress were missing, and the hall door, which Robert had left on the latch, was now locked. Mademoiselle had apparently returned sometime during the night, collected a few necessities, and left again as quietly as she had come. But she had left behind her one memento of her arrival. On the centre of the bare dressing-table, where her brush and comb had previously lain, stood a small china bear.

  There was something white lying in the shadow just behind the door, and Miranda stooped mechanically and picked it up, but it was only a much crumpled face-tissue. ‘Elizabeth Arden,’ noted Miranda with a mild sense of surprise. She had not suspected Mademoiselle of such expensive tastes. Somehow one connected her complexion more with face flannels and carbolic soap.

  ‘I don’t understand!’ said Stella angrily. ‘If she wanted to go, why didn’t she say so? Why didn’t she explain? She might at least have given me a month’s notice instead of going off like this and leaving me in the lurch. Besides, we owe her for nearly three weeks. Robert, you don’t think there’s anything behind it, do you?’

  ‘Of course there’s something behind it,’ said Robert crossly. ‘She’s tired of being interrogated by the police, and someone has offered her a better job at a considerably higher salary. We weren’t paying her much, and you can bet your bottom dollar that some dame in the French or American sector has been advertising for a governess at three times the amount, and the old witch saw it and has snapped it up.’

  ‘But to go off being owed money!’

  ‘My dear girl, if she’d told you she wanted to go, you’d have insisted on her giving a month’s notice—you know you would! And the chances are she couldn’t wait. I hold no brief for the woman, but I can follow her line of reasoning.’

  ‘Well I think it’s beastly of her!’ burst out Stella angrily. ‘After we’ve paid her fare out here and everything! Can’t we report her to the police or something, and at least get the money for her fare refunded?’

  ‘I doubt if we’d have a le
g to stand on,’ said Robert moodily. ‘The employee is always right in these days. Anyway I have no intention of wasting time and money is prosecuting the woman. Let her go—and the hell with her!’

  But it appeared that the authorities took an entirely different view of the matter.

  The following day, answering a ring at the doorbell, Miranda was confronted by Simon Lang. He walked in without ceremony, tossed his hat onto the hall table and said without preamble: ‘What’s this about the Melvilles’ Swiss governess having run out on them?’

  Miranda stiffened. ‘Hadn’t you better ask my cousin?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘I tried to, but he’s out on some conference. I’d like to see Mrs Melville, please.’

  ‘She’s out,’ said Miranda briefly.

  ‘Then you’ll have to do instead. Has the governess disappeared?’

  Miranda said carefully: ‘Mademoiselle Beljame has left. Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  Miranda hesitated, frowning, and Simon said with unwonted terseness: ‘Don’t be silly, Miranda! This is serious.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Well apart from anything else we have two unsolved murders on our hands, and your Mademoiselle Beljame is a possible suspect.’

  ‘Do you—do you really think that she might have done it?’

  ‘What I think is beside the point,’ said Simon Lang. ‘At the moment I want to know when Mademoiselle Beljame went, where she is, and why the hell it wasn’t reported immediately!’

  ‘But we don’t know where she is,’ said Miranda breathlessly. She sat down somewhat abruptly on a hall chair and explained the circumstances, and when she had finished he asked to be shown Mademoiselle’s room. It had, however, been swept and dusted only that morning, the bed-linen removed and the blankets nearly folded.

  ‘Who did this?’ demanded Simon.

  ‘We did. Stella and I. We do the rooms now that Friedel—until we can get a housemaid. Mademoiselle did her own of course, but as she wasn’t here we did it. Her trunk is under the bed. I thought we ought to pack her things in it, but Stella said to leave them as they were, and if she wanted them she could jolly well come and pack them herself.’

  Simon opened the cupboard, and looked into the drawers, but Mademoiselle’s scanty possessions had little to tell him.

  ‘Why wasn’t this reported at once?’

  ‘I don’t think it occurred to us,’ said Miranda candidly. ‘We just thought she’d heard of a better job and left. It happens pretty often in Berlin, I gather; you just ask any of the wives! Stella wanted to tell the police. But only because of having paid her fare out, not because she thought there was anything fishy about it.’

  Simon made no comment. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked about the room with the shadow of a frown between his brows, and after an appreciable interval he said: ‘If she went into the Stadium area last night we ought to be able to fix the time she went in and the time she left, because of the guards on the gates. Except that it was possible—though damn difficult—to get out of that place without using one of the entrances, providing one is prepared to risk taking a bit of skin off oneself.’

  He stood up. ‘Where can I find Mrs Melville? I’d like to see her.’

  ‘She went out to do some shopping at the Naafi,’ said Miranda, following him out on to the landing and watching indignantly while he locked the door behind him and calmly pocketed the key. ‘I think she was going to the Lawrences’,’ she added as an afterthought as they reached the hall. ‘You might find her there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Simon, picking up his hat. He paused by the hall door and looked at the catch of the Yale lock, and then said: ‘How many other exits are there from this house? Apart from the windows, of course?’

  ‘Two; the back door and the french window in the drawing-room. But we bolt those every night.’ Miranda looked at his still face and said breathlessly: ‘But if Mademoiselle did it—the murders I mean—she couldn’t get away! No one can get in or out of Berlin without endless passports and identity cards and bits of paper.’

  Simon Lang transferred his speculative gaze from the Yale lock to Miranda’s face and said: ‘You’ve forgotten the Russian zone. It provides an admirable bolt-hole for every variety of bad hat.’

  ‘Then you think she’s in East Berlin?’

  ‘No,’ said Simon meditatively, ‘I think she’s—’ He stopped and gave a slight shrug of his shoulders and said: ‘No matter,’ and turning away, opened the door and went down the short path that led to the gate, and drove away.

  Stella returned just before lunch. She had met Simon Lang at the Lawrences’, and she seemed cheerful and almost exhilarated. ‘He thinks Mademoiselle my have something to do with the murders,’ she explained, ‘and that she’s taken fright and made a bolt for it. I only hope it’s true!’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Miranda, startled.

  ‘Because if only it is her it means that it wasn’t—’ Stella broke off abruptly and bit her lip. ‘I mean,’ she said carefully, ‘that if it was Mademoiselle, then the whole matter is cleared up and we won’t have any more of those ghastly police inquiries and people snooping around the house asking questions. It means that it’s all over, and we can breathe again and enjoy ourselves, and nothing else frightening can happen.’

  Miranda said quickly: ‘For goodness sake cross your fingers when you say things like that! We don’t know yet that she was the one.’

  ‘She must be!’ insisted Stella passionately. ‘She’s got to be! If she isn’t, why did she run away?’

  ‘Perhaps because she had heard of a better job—as Robert suggested. It may still be that, you know.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Stella obstinately. ‘Of course she’s the murderer! Why don’t you want it to be her?’

  ‘I do want it to be her,’ confessed Miranda. ‘That is, if it has to be one of us, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather it was. I’ve never liked the woman. She gives me the creeps; I don’t know why. Like spiders! The whole house feels a better place now that she’s out of it. Those awful caraway seeds! Do you remember the time your mother gave me a slice of seed cake when I was about twelve—the day we took a picnic to the Roman camp—and I was instantly sick all over the chocolate éclairs?’

  Stella made a grimace and laughed. ‘Yes I do. Beastly child! But that was years before Mademoiselle arrived on the scene. I wasn’t even married to Robert then. Lottie wasn’t born.’

  ‘Oh, I know: I wasn’t suggesting that I disliked caraway seeds because of Mademoiselle. Only that I probably disliked Mademoiselle because of the caraway seeds! I hope that she just disappears into the Russian zone and that we never hear of her again. The Russians are welcome to her! All the same, we may well hear that she is merely pursuing her governessing in some innocuous home in the American sector; and if so we are right back where we started from and still under suspicion.’

  But by tea-time no trace had yet been found of the errant governess, and a representative of the K.R.I.P.O., the German police force, speaking correct but halting English, had called to ask more questions and to interrogate Frau Herbach, the cook.

  Robert returned shortly after tea in a bad temper. He had not seem Simon Lang, but Colonel Cantrell, the A.P.M., had apparently rung him up at his office and been brusquely outspoken on the subject of his failure to report the disappearance of Mademoiselle Beljame. Robert was normally an easy-going and even-tempered person, but Colonel Cantrell’s comments having been forceful in the extreme, he was feeling sore and sulky, and Miranda hastened to accept an unexpected invitation by the Leslies to go swimming, and hoped that by the time she returned the atmosphere in the house would be less electric.

  There were not many people at the indoor pool, for although the water was kept at a comfortable temperature and the big building was warmed throughout, it was still too early in the year, and too cold, for people to think of swimming.

  Sally Page, her pretty figure showing to advantage in
a brief swimming suit of white satin, was sitting at the far side of the pool, her feet dangling in the water, talking to Elsa Marson.

  Mrs Marson, wearing a gaily coloured bathing-dress and a scarlet cap, was obviously in better spirits, and it occurred to Miranda that this was the first time that she had ever seen her laugh. Elsa Marson had always seemed pale and anxious, but this evening there were patches of bright colour in her cheeks, her eyes were sparkling and she looked as though some load of anxiety had been lifted from her shoulders. Catching sight of Mrs Leslie and Miranda she waved, and slipping into the water swam across to them.

  ‘What’s the water like?’ asked Norah Leslie, peering cautiously over the edge.

  ‘Too warm,’ said Elsa. She turned to Miranda. ‘Sally says that it was the Melvilles’ Swiss governess who did the murders, and that she has run away to hide herself in East Berlin. Is it true?’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Leslie sharply. She swung round to look at Miranda, her face pale and startled.

  Miranda inquired tartly as to where Sally Page had obtained her information, but Norah Leslie was not to be deflected: ‘Is it true?’ she demanded. ‘Did that woman really do it? Who said so? How did they find out?’

  ‘We don’t know that she did,’ said Miranda briefly. ‘Sally’s only guessing.’

  ‘Then she has disappeared?’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Miranda reluctantly. ‘But we think she may have merely gone off to some better-paid job. You know what it’s like in Berlin. I gather that in spite of all the talk of unemployment, anyone who hears of a better job, or feels peevish for any trivial reason, is apt to walk out without a word of warning, and the first their employer knows of it is when the cook or the housemaid or the nurse fails to turn up. Mademoiselle may have found it catching.’

  ‘But she has disappeared?’ insisted Mrs Leslie.