Mornings in London

by Janice Law

  Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, not if Rinaldi knew I’d been at Poppy’s and her mother’s. He might even think we’d found the material earlier. In fact, he must have, if he was, as I now suspected, behind the purse snatching that broke Poppy’s arm. Did that clear the men in the squad car? Would I be safest to put those negatives into Inspector Davis’s eager hands? In my present state, I wasn’t sure. Poppy had been watched and attacked in the hopes of getting them. Then nothing. I find the negatives and, voilà, I’m taken out to lunch with Rinaldi, who—

  What precisely had he done? I patted my pockets. My keys were gone; fortunately I had not been carrying Pops’s with me. Money? I patted my pockets. I still had three shillings and seven pence, but the lining of the little change purse had been slit, so a careful search. Rinaldi and his associates—he couldn’t be acting alone—were serious; they’d gotten an elegant restaurant to drug a patron and managed to get me out of the dining room and off to Soho Square with a search in between.

  Slick moves, but I thought they’d given up rather too easily. I was convinced I had been unconscious almost from the moment I hit the floor. Their search turned up nothing. I wasn’t carrying whatever they’d expected from Freddie. Wouldn’t they have been tempted to let me regain my senses and then beat the information out of me?

  Or was that too compromising for the fancy eatery? Maybe, but I suspected Mussolini’s boys could get away with a lot, even in London where the immigrant population had folks back home in the new Italy to worry about. Were they convinced I was telling the truth? I doubted that very much. I stuck my hand in my pocket, meaning to rattle my keys, a habit Nan deplores, even though I already knew my keys were gone. This time, though, the loss registered. I’d been spared a beating or worse because they thought they had what they needed.

  I had to warn Nan. I had to get back to the studio. I started to run across the square, swayed, almost fell, caught myself, and cautious although my heart was jumping, started walking, and running whenever I was able, back to the studio.

  Chapter 8

  I staggered toward Avant Design, bouncing off lampposts and pillar boxes with my heart jumping and my lungs protesting. The door showed the Closed sign, just as I’d left it: I’d arrived in time; I’d panicked unnecessarily; all was well. I fumbled for my keys, remembered they were lost, and began pounding on the door. “Nan! Nan! It’s me!”

  No answer. They had come, Nan was hurt, maybe even—I hit the door with all my strength, rattled the handle, and almost fell facedown when the unlocked door swung open. “Nan!”

  Inside the showroom, the sample rugs had been torn from the walls, the leather backs and seats on the two display chairs, slashed. I opened the door to the back. Broken crockery lay on the kitchen floor, and papers and finished designs were strewn about my studio, along with the contents of the upturned drawers of my worktable. “Nan!”

  A sound from my bedroom. I found her lying across the bed, gagged with hands and feet tied, looking very small, white, and fragile. When I was a child, Nan had been my protector, the one person I could rely on, and she’d always seemed large and powerful. I realized with a shock that had been a trick of perspective, an illusion created to protect and encourage me. I untied the rag across her mouth. “Are you hurt? Are you hurt, Nan?”

  She shook her head. I struggled to unpick the knots before lurching off to get my scissors to cut the ropes.

  Freed, she sat up, rubbing her wrists. “Just bumps and bruises. Nothing to write home about.” She looked through to the showroom. “Oh, your lovely chairs! Dear boy! I am so sorry. I must not have locked the door when you left.”

  “No, no, Nan, they had a key. They stole mine.”

  “That’s why I heard the rattle of the lock and thought you were back. I went through to say hello and there they were. Two big fellows with cloth caps pulled down. And wearing gloves. I wondered why.”

  I pressed her hand.

  “I told them that they’d have to come back later, that the studio was closed for lunch, and they said they’d come for Freddie’s stuff.”

  “That’s how they put it? Not photographs or papers?”

  Nan thought for a minute. “No, that’s odd, isn’t it? I think they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for.”

  “Or what form it was in?”

  “That must be it. They went through your desk, I know they did. I told them to see they put everything back, and they told me to get out of the room. I thought I could get to the front door. That’s when they tied me up. They didn’t get Miss Poppy’s key, though. You’d left it in the kitchen, and I’d slipped it into my pocket.” She held it up.

  “Good show, Nan!”

  “I was so worried you’d come back while they were here, Francis, and then I was afraid something had happened to you, when you were so late. It is late, isn’t it? They’d pulled the shades down, but I could tell the light was going.”

  I sat beside her and told her about my lunch with Rinaldi, concluding with our little glasses of grappa.

  “Grappa? One of those Italian drinks?” My nan is staunch for all things British.

  “It tasted odd, but I thought that’s what grappa tasted like.”

  “Most likely! Another of those queer foreign things.”

  “Right, but with something distinctly off in it. I came to in Soho Square. Money in my pocket but no keys.”

  “Dear boy! You were shanghaied.”

  “The closest I’ll get to being a sailor. But, Nan, the negatives. Did they find the negatives?”

  “Certainly not, though I expected any minute they’d start on the walls. But they didn’t.” She sniffed. “Maybe not really skilled labor?”

  “Lucky for us.”

  “But your chairs, your nice sketches! And the rugs. Are the rugs all right?”

  “The main thing is that you are all right, Nan! If the chair frames are intact, the seats and backs can be replaced. I don’t know about the rugs. I’ll have a look.”

  Now that Nan was safe, I could be upset about the showroom. The rugs had small tears where they had been carelessly pulled from the hooks, but the intruders hadn’t thought to slash the backing, and Nan could probably mend them. The chair frames were fine; the good leather seats, backs, and arm covers would all need replacement. Money out the door.

  In my workroom, pens, brushes, pencils, paints, and supplies had been dumped on the floor and finished drawings trampled underfoot. Although many were torn, I saw that I could salvage some work: This time, our intruders had been on a search, rather than destroy, mission. Next time, we might not be so lucky. I wedged the stoutest chair in the house under the front doorknob and told Nan we would have to call a locksmith.

  “The police, too, dear boy. For your insurance claim.”

  I hate contacting the police for any reason, but she was right. Not to call them, especially if Rinaldi had a contact at the Met, would suggest we had something to hide. The only question was what to tell them, and I thought that over while Nan made us a nursery supper of toast and hard-boiled eggs, washed down with a lot of strong tea with sugar. After we finished eating, and before I could come up with an excuse, I nipped around to the corner phone box and dialed Inspector Davis’s number.

  To my surprise, he answered. Give the man credit, he worked long hours. “You wanted me to see more of Rinaldi,” I said. “I’ve now seen too much of him. He drugged me at lunch, stole my keys, and sent two men to terrorize Nan. They ripped up my design studio. I’m going to have to file an insurance claim.”

  “We’ll talk in person,” Davis said, rather quickly, I thought, and promised to stop by that night. He arrived within the hour, accompanied by a slim, dark sergeant who was delegated to take Nan’s statement. The sergeant had liquid black eyes and an insinuating manner that made me wonder if sergeants were chiefly selected to contrast with their leaders.

>   “Who knows how long I’d have lain there if my dear boy hadn’t come back,” Nan said. “We’ve touched nothing, except the crockery. We had to shift that. They left broken china all over the kitchen floor.”

  “Looking for something, were they?”

  “Must have been,” she said with a straight face. “Though I told them we hadn’t a bean except for the studio samples.”

  When Nan took the sergeant through to the back rooms to see the other damage, Davis gave me a sour look. “You handled that badly,” he said.

  That was rich! “Signor Rinaldi stopped by the studio,” I said, struggling with my temper. “I was just leaving for lunch, and he invited me to the Taverna Firenze.”

  “Nice to be on a diplomat’s expenses.”

  “Very nice. I can recommend everything except the grappa. Mine was drugged.” I described coming to amid a pile of crates off Soho Square without my keys. “I could barely walk.”

  Inspector Davis looked skeptical. “Why would an Italian attaché do that?”

  Here was the delicate moment. I needed to convince him—as I hoped the futile search had convinced Rinaldi—that I had nothing of value. “He labors under the impression that I’d found whatever it was Freddie wanted to sell him. He offered me a hundred pounds. Money I certainly could use now.” I nodded toward the damaged chairs.

  Inspector Davis was silent for a moment. A hundred pounds was a significant sum. “So Bosworth had been selling information to the Italians?”

  “From what Rinaldi implied, they had an ongoing arrange­ment.”

  “Bosworth’s normal line was compromising photographs of the rich and influential.”

  “Possibly he branched out, but I haven’t a clue what he did with the material. As I’ve already told you, there was nothing out of place when Poppy and I visited her flat, no mysterious documents or surprise packages, nothing.”

  I waited for him to ask if I’d visited Poppy’s flat again. That would be the natural question, but he didn’t raise the subject. Was he convinced of my innocence? Or did he already know I’d been seen leaving the building? And if he didn’t know, did that mean one of his patrolmen was Rinaldi’s contact? Questions, questions! As I told Nan later, there were plenty of possibilities, and all of them were bad.

  She still leaned toward trusting the Met, whose exploits she followed in the Telegraph’s crime news. “You can’t be absolutely sure no one but the two policemen saw you near Miss Poppy’s flat.”

  “No, I can’t. But I’m sure enough that I don’t want to take a chance. Freddie was killed, Poppy’s still missing, I was drugged, and you were threatened. If one of those cops is dirty, what’s to keep us safe after we hand over the negatives?”

  Nan took this under advisement. At last she said, “Only one thing to do. You’ll have to contact your uncle.”

  “Lastings is an unregenerate rogue.”

  “Of course, he is, dear boy, but he’s British through and through. He’ll not let anything valuable fall into the hands of that fat Italian rascal Mussolini.”

  There was something to that, but ever since my uncle removed some dodgy paintings he’d been storing at my studio, he’d made himself scarce. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, either. “I haven’t seen Uncle Lastings in months. He could be off, you know, being someone else. For all I know, he’s decided to become a Frenchman again.” Being temporarily French had been an integral part of a recent scheme to solicit genuine portraits of a bogus actress, a typical Lastings maneuver.

  “I don’t see you have another choice,” she said.

  I argued this for a while, but eventually, I agreed to try contacting him. “Sometime. But those films can’t harm anyone as long as they’re in our hands.”

  Nan agreed this was very true, but I could tell she was unenthusiastic about the delay. “I feel we should do something,” she said. “Miss Poppy, now. Where is she? Why hasn’t she been found? You need to talk to your aunt again. I think you should go down to Hastings and see that Inspector Carstairs.”

  The mention of Aunt Theresa made me think I’d almost rather deal with Uncle Lastings. As far as relatives went, I was between Scylla and Charybdis.

  I was still undecided which was the lesser evil when Nan brought me the mail the next morning. Second from the bottom was a pale blue envelope with my address in a bold feminine hand. There was a faint hint of perfume, too.

  “Well?” said Nan and raised her eyebrows.

  “Perhaps Avant Design has a secret admirer.” But I was wrong. Inside was a brief note in the same distinctive hand. Call me soonest. Poppy’s disappeared for real. She said to trust you. It was signed Elizabeth Armitage. I handed the note to Nan.

  “Sounds as if they’d been in touch and now Miss Poppy has vanished.”

  “It does sound like it,” I agreed.

  “Don’t wait around, dear boy. I can handle the insurance adjuster. And shall I write to that Mr. Mendelssohn? About repairing the chairs?”

  “Yes, but tell him it will be a week or so before I can bring them,” I said as I headed to the phone box. The servant who answered my call went to find Miss Elizabeth. “This is Francis, Poppy’s cousin,” I said when she came on the line.

  Immediately, her voice changed, undoubtedly for someone else’s benefit. “Oh, Edwina! How terrific to hear from you. Of course, we can get together! Too fun! Early lunch at a Lyons?”

  I agreed, and she selected a Corner House within walking distance. “Twenty minutes,” she said and hung up.

  At the Lyons, I was lucky to find a seat near the door where I could watch new arrivals. A slim, dark woman looked too fashionable for the ex-hockey captain, and she started waving to friends the minute she crossed the threshold. Three girls together, arm in arm, giggling through the door, were all equally unlikely. Several matrons, too old by a decade, arrived, loaded with shopping, before a solidly constructed blonde with a short, sensible haircut, a rose twin set, a tweed skirt, and an athlete’s muscular swagger appeared. I stood up, and she immediately came to the table and sat down.

  “Francis. Supposedly, Pops’s cousin.” No smile on her wide face, no greeting, all business.

  “Her mother would vouch for me,” I said, “but I don’t think you want to involve Aunt Theresa.” Then I had an inspiration. I pulled out my wallet and handed her my ticket for the British Museum’s Reading Room. “Will that do?”

  “You’re Francis, all right.” She returned the card. “Poppy said you’re a real intellectual.”

  “You’ve heard from her?”

  Just then, a Nippy, smart in her black outfit with starched white collar, cuffs, and apron, came to take our order.

  “Tea and sandwiches do you, Francis?” Lizzie asked.

  I said that would be fine and waited on pins and needles, as Nan would say, before the waitress disappeared with our order and Lizzie nodded. “She called me from Hastings.”

  “When?”

  “The first call came the day that her disappearance hit the papers. I’d just been reading the story when the phone rang. Thank goodness Nell didn’t recognize the voice.”

  “And Poppy was safe then?”

  “She thought so. At that moment, anyway. I wanted to phone her mother, I thought I ought to, but Pops about blew her top. She had to stay away, because her mother would have the police and press and everyone down on her.”

  “She might have done. What a mess! The constabulary started searching the morning she was gone. Poppy’ll be up for wasting police time.”

  “Minor detail,” Lizzie said. “Here come our sandwiches.”

  “If that’s minor, what’s major?”

  “Eat,” said Lizzie, “then let’s take a walk.”

  I was certainly getting a different view of debs and hockey players. Lizzie said nothing more to the point until we’d finished off the cheese, tomat
o, and cucumber sandwiches and emptied our pot of tea, giving me plenty of time to study her strong, even features. Personally, as far as subjects go, I prefer a few oddities in a face, but I had to admit that Poppy’s athletic friend showed what Nan would call an abundance of character.

  Outside the Lyons, she looked both ways, took my arm, and set a course for Russell Square. “Poppy doesn’t trust the police,” she said.

  “Normally, I’d be the first to agree, but in this case . . .”

  Lizzie shook her head. “This case especially. I don’t know the ins and outs, but Pops seemed really frightened. First time ever, I’m guessing.”

  “She did find Freddie’s corpse.”

  “This isn’t about Freddie’s death. She’s taken that pretty calmly. It’s whatever she learned about Freddie.”

  I thought that over. Although she’d been shattered by the discovery of Freddie’s corpse, she’d recovered well. Or seemed to. And then there was the desperate summons to Larkin Manor to be considered. “Poppy sounded distraught when she asked me to the house party, though when I arrived, she seemed the same as ever.”

  “She was very good in the Mikado at school.”

  That struck me as a non sequitur until she added, “She played the Lord High Executioner,” and gave me a puckish smile.

  “My cousin has hidden talents.”

  “Too right. And I think—” Lizzie paused and said no more until we reached the square and started along one of the curving paths under the trees. Then she stopped in the middle of the path, as if uncertain what, or how much, to say. “Her late father was military intelligence. I guess you knew that.” A questioning look.

  “I only knew that he was a colonel in India.”

  “He had contacts,” Lizzie continued. “Pops knows at least some of them. I think she discovered something and told one of them and landed herself in a mess.”

  “Maybe right before the Larkin house party?”

  “Possibly. Was there any other reason to invite you? I don’t mean that rudely.”

  “Understood. Poppy knew I hated the country and country house parties. The note she sent me wasn’t like her at all.”