‘She married an Oriental.’ The language was pompous. Old. Victorian, perhaps? It was impossible to tell.
‘Entitled to kill…’ This had to be advice from a judge, a bit of a lecture after the conclusion of a case. It was no good, though, he had nothing more. He turned to the poetry, not his strong point, to say the least. The verse had to be tied to the quotes, but how? The ghosts of society. Outraged society. Above him, the station announcements burbled incomprehensibly, blurring echoes. Indistinct people rushed past. A train was pulling out.
Could this female victim have been a lady of society? Speeches, weddings, hosts, toasts. She hadn’t wanted any music. She was upset by her husband’s threat. ‘A person who honestly believes that his life is in danger is entitled to kill his assailant.’ But it was a woman whose life had been in danger. So she hadn’t been the victim, she had been the murderess, and she had been acquitted; she had honestly believed her life to be in danger. ‘My husband has threatened to kill me…’
A society murder case, an act of violence that had possibly been committed in public. There had to be something more. Who had made the quotes, who had authored the poem? He started with the latter, speaking it aloud. An elderly woman standing nearby gave him a filthy stare and moved away.
It sounded like more of a song than a poem. A touch of iambic pentameter. There was an air of familiar jauntiness. Vince rose and crossed the concourse to the station bookshop, hoping to find something, anything that might point him in the right direction. He checked the time, 7:12 p.m.
He had no idea where to start in the small poetry section, so he turned to the crime books instead, and began checking the shelves.
True Crime and Criminals. Famous Cases of the Old Bailey…Great Crimes of the Twentieth Century.
He could hardly start buying books indiscriminately. He only had a few pounds in his pocket, and his current account was so empty that his cashcard would be no help, so he was forced to thumb through each volume looking for clues. A shop assistant with a face like an unpopular root vegetable stood watching with his arms folded, ready to weed out browsers. The shop was waiting to close. The Murder Club Guide to London. The Trials of Marshall Hall. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder…Ghosts of the City.
He had barely started thumbing through the indices when the assistant shuffled over to the entrance and pulled a steel shutter down with a bang.
It was impossible. He suddenly saw how difficult it would be uncovering information in the city after dark. There were no other bookstores likely to be open now, and most libraries would soon be closing their doors. One solution presented itself: he could gain access to the Internet. Sebastian had said nothing in the charter about that. He needed to find one of the cyber-cafés dotting the city like electronic beacons, and run some information searches. The man at the station information counter was mystified by his request, but the young girl refilling the brochure holders was not, and directed him to a street behind the coach station where a smart new cafeteria called Blutopia waited beneath a sign of flickering cobalt neon.
He wiped the rain from the scuffed sleeves of his black nylon jacket, purchased a coffee and threaded his way between shining aluminium tables to a free monitor with an up-and-running search engine.
How could he run a search without something specific to look for? The wording in the clue was so vague as to be useless. He could imagine how many thousands of matches a word like ‘oriental’ or ‘society’ would generate. He tried longer phrases, and finding no correspondents, entered the True Crime titles he had been prevented from perusing in the station bookstore, starting with ‘Old Bailey’, then weeding the information down to ‘murder trials’, but there were still so many that he knew it would take several hours to go through them all. He wanted to call Louie and ask his help, even though his esoteric knowledge extended no further than episode titles of obscure science fiction shows.
An extraordinary feeling of isolation had settled over him, a sense of secret urgency that no one who met his eyes would understand. He wondered if any of the other patrons seated around him harboured mysteries, but they mostly looked like the usual net-heads, filling up the hours of a dull, rainy winter evening.
Abandoning ‘Old Bailey’, he tried the title of another book he had seen in the store, ‘The Trials of Marshall Hall’, and was rewarded with an entry for the legendary Victorian lawyer. Almost without thinking, he opened it. The page was part of a bookstore’s mail-order service. Under a heading marked ‘Society’s Greatest Scandals’ he found the answer to his question—or at least, to part of it.
It appeared to be a chapter title from the book he had seen: ‘She made the greatest mistake a woman of the West can make. She married an Oriental.’ Below the caption was a photograph of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, defence lawyer for someone called Madame Marie-Marguerite Fahhim, a high-society Parisian beauty accused of shooting her Egyptian husband, Prince Ali Kamel Fahhim Bey, dead in 1923. A cause-célèbre, said the text, the greatest London scandal of the age. She was found innocent, provoked beyond endurance by the Prince’s sexual habits and casual cruelties. But there was also a powerful undercurrent of racism here, just the sort of thing Sebastian and his pals would have taken delight in. The page of clues beside the console had finally disintegrated into a rough pale ash. He read on, scrolling down the page.
The Egyptian government had cabled the Attorney-General to complain of derogatory remarks made about ‘Orientals’ during the trial. And the remark about not wanting music, it was made by Madame Fahhim to the band-leader of the Savoy, where they had a suite.
Where the murder had taken place.
And now the poem suddenly made sense, if one assumed that it owed its rumpty-tumpty style to someone with a strong Savoy connection, someone like W. S. Gilbert. But these were no lyrics for his composer, Sir Arthur Sullivan—or if they were, Vince was unfamiliar with them. As a child he had alarmed his mother by learning all the words to HMS Pinafore and singing them loudly in the bath when he should have been belting out the lyrics to current Top Ten hits like normal children. The poem had the feeling of an early Savoy song, as though from a simpler time. He ran a search on ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ and connected through to their archive pages.
The stanza was contained in something called the Bab Ballads, a short anthology of verse penned by W. S. Gilbert and published before the duo went onto create their operas. The Savoy Operas, pretty, passionless pieces inspired by the extraordinary success of Jacques Offenbach, one of Sebastian’s favourite composers.
Vince had twenty minutes left in which to reach the Savoy Hotel.
Chapter 21
West End Farce
But of course, they would never let him in. Not to any part of the hotel beyond the lobby, at any rate. He should have changed, worn something a bit more adaptable, but there had been no time.
How, then, to start? He approached the gleaming Rolls-Royce frontage of the Savoy with trepidation. It was a trick, of course, to make him feel aware of his station in life, to make him feel small. And it was working. Standing there in the chill air with a mist spilling in from the Embankment, he felt out of place, insignificant in his torn damp jeans and nylon padded jacket. Couples appeared before him in evening dress, drifting through the bronzed revolving doors into the night. Japanese, French and Italian conversations surrounded him, bossy Home Counties accents, the clipped tones of Henley gels, the Essex argy-bargy of bullish businessmen, every kind of voice except his own. He did not belong there. He belonged back in Peckham, in his mother’s divided semi with its babies and aunts, with the blaring radio in the kitchen and the unrepaired motorbike in the hall.
Not true, he told himself, rubbing the blood back into his hands. He took another look at the guests. Tourists, conference speakers, business delegates, couples celebrating wedding anniversaries, just people. Hotel life had changed. Anyone could come here now. To hell with it, he thought, all they can do is kick me out.
Well, they could, and t
herein lay the problem. Vince knew he would certainly not be able to enter the hotel’s American Bar dressed the way he was, nor the restaurant, the scene of Madame Marie-Marguerite Fahhim’s ‘music’ remark. He had no idea in which room she had shot her husband, although perhaps one of the staff knew. But the League would not be so obvious as to leave his next assignment in the room. Too easy. He had to remember that this was a test. There was hidden trickery here.
Sebastian had advised his members about setting the challenges. How much instruction had he given them? How did his mind work? How much—or little—had the pair of them discovered about each other in the short time that they had been friends?
Another time check. 7:51 p.m. At the corner a gang of dead-eyed youths turned to watch him pass, checking for a sign of weakness. Scrawny-necked skinheads barking and spitting beside the half-excavated road, black boys in Armani knock-offs making sucky-sucky noises at passing girls. The safety of the Strand—a comparatively recent novelty—was already becoming a thing of the past. Unsure how to proceed, he walked back to the top of the short street and looked out into the traffic.
The street was busy. Theatres were beginning their evening performances. As he was wondering what to do next, the telephone in the call box nearest to him started to ring. He seized the receiver without a second thought.
‘Well, why aren’t you going in?’ asked Sebastian. ‘You’ll fall behind your schedule if you don’t pick up the pace and solve the clue. You only have until 8:00 p.m. to find the answer.’
‘Don’t you have something better to do?’ he asked, looking up at the dead office windows around him. ‘Shouldn’t you all be slipping into robes and fezzes, dancing about in circles, sacrificing goats?’ Where the hell were they? How could they see him?
‘How do you know we’re not? Solve the clue, Vincent, solve it if you want to stay alive. You have about—oh, seven minutes.’
The line went dead. He threw down the receiver and paced angrily back to the corner. Think, damn you, he told himself. Think.
Something wasn’t right. The poem. Details of the shooting scandal had been designed to lead him to the Savoy. So why bother to add the poem?
The W. S. Gilbert quote was meant to take him further. There could be no other reason to include it. He dug in his back pocket and pulled the remaining scraps of the disintegrated page from his jeans.
‘—Horrible, social ghosts—’
It was no good. The streets were too boisterous. He couldn’t think.
‘—Speeches—’
‘—Variety—’
He looked along the Strand again, to the Savoy Theatre—the original home of Gilbert and Sullivan, before they had moved up to the grandeur of Sir Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Palace Theatre.
You’ll find their names on the architrave…Not the Savoy Hotel at all, that was just a pointer. The architrave. Wasn’t that the blank bit between a pillar and its roof? Theatres utilised such gaps to run favourable newspaper quotes along them.
He broke into a trot, pushing through the crowd that was filtering slowly into the Savoy Theatre. He tried to read what the critics had written about the play, something called Whoops, There Go My Trousers.
‘A Laugh-a-Minute Trouser-Dropping Farce’—Sheridan Morley, Evening Standard. ‘Does what Britain does best—makes a total fool of itself’—Irving Wardle—The Times.
That was what it said above the doors, and there, on a dropping-stained ledge above the lightbulbs, was what looked like a bottle of champagne with an envelope tied around its neck—but how on earth was he supposed to reach it? He stepped back and examined the front of the theatre. There was no way of scaling the wall. Nothing else for it; he would have to climb out from one of the first-floor windows.
Entering the crowded theatre foyer was easy enough. Two young ushers were tearing tickets at the foot of the main staircase. There was no other way up. He picked the dopier-looking of the pair, a spidery-haired youth in an ill-fitting jacket, and waited until he was tearing the tickets of a group. As he slipped behind the backs of the waiting patrons, the usher spotted him and raised a hand.
‘It’s all right, I just forgot something,’ he said, pointing vaguely ahead, and kept moving forward with his head down, waiting for someone to come after him. But when he turned around, he saw that the usher’s attention had been seized by a coach-party impatiently awaiting entrance.
He hurried on, checking his watch. 7:57 p.m. There was no time left for indecision. At the first floor was an open carpeted area, the arched windows beyond standing floor-to-ceiling. Attempting to look as officious as possible, he marched over to the one he judged to be nearest the bottle, pulled it open and looked out. The envelope stood in a blaze of light, still several feet from the window, but this was the nearest point of access. There was nothing for it but to go out on the ledge.
If only he didn’t have this thing about heights. Well, not a thing, exactly. As a child he had been taken on a funicular railway, and had howled through the journey. Looking down brought that familiar sickening sense of the earth dropping away.
Remember the old adage, he thought, then dropped to all fours and began to edge himself out. At his back, several playgoers turned and shot him disapproving looks, something Londoners did when they were irrationally annoyed by someone but hadn’t the guts to say anything. The angled narrow sill was thick with black dust and covered in tangles of electrical cable. It was virtually impossible to establish a firm foothold. As he edged out, his vision firmly fixed on the nearest wall, someone—incredibly—shut the window behind him and dropped the bolt. What the hell were they thinking of?
Light bounced from his watch-face: 7:59 p.m. He was out of time. There was nowhere to go but forward. He was sure he could be seen from the street, but few people ever looked up. His right foot slipped, scattering pieces of cracked paintwork out over the bulbs. His duffel bag slid from his shoulder and swung down to the crook of his right arm. If he had wanted to attract attention to himself, he was certainly going about it the right way.
The envelope was less than a metre from him now. In the light from the display bulbs he could clearly read his name on the front. He shifted his left knee forward across a clump of wiring, but the clump moved and his leg went with it. Within moments his centre of balance had shifted badly and he was fighting to maintain his equilibrium. But it was no good; he could feel himself going over. His left foot thumped down on one bulb and smashed it, then another popped as the lower half of his body slithered off the ledge and out into space. Below him, someone shouted up in alarm.
It was his last chance to seize the letter. He threw out his right arm and grabbed the bottle as he slithered into the air and dropped towards the pavement below. Why he couldn’t have landed on a fat woman in a fur coat, he didn’t know; instead he crashed down on top of what appeared to be an emaciated crustie leading a mongrel on a piece of string, which yelped and promptly bit him on the leg. The crustie slid over onto his back, and Vince landed astride his chest.
‘Shit!’
‘What the—’
He kicked out at the dog, which had its teeth sunk firmly in his left boot.
‘Mind my dog!’
‘Get him off me!’
Vince sat up and shoved his hair out of his eyes. It wasn’t a crustie at all, but a sickly young man with a badly shaved head and an oversized navy raincoat who, having fulfilled his role as a human airbag, was attempting to wriggle out from beneath his attacker and stand up. Patrons peered timidly out from the foyer of the theatre at them, convinced that some sort of crime had been committed. The dog was still refusing to relax its jaws, presumably out of loyalty to its master.
‘Crippen, let go! It’s just his way of making friends, mate. He likes to get a taste of you first.’
‘He’ll get a taste of my boot if he tries it again.’ Vince belatedly remembered that he was not supposed to talk to anyone. Alarmed, he finally managed to push the dog away, rose and wiped himself down. The man who
had broken his fall was patting his chest as if testing for broken ribs.
‘What were you doing up there? That could have been nasty. Did you fall out? Who’s the bubbly for? You celebrating something?’
He dared not answer. He could feel Sebastian’s men watching him from some vantage point nearby.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you talk to street people? Fucking Tory! Sybaritic Saatchi sycophant!’
‘Do you mind, I voted Labour in the last election,’ Vince muttered, groggily setting off along the kerb. The fall had disturbed his equilibrium.
‘Typical, bloody champagne socialist!’
He slipped into an alleyway at the side of the theatre, praying that Sebastian had not seen him talking to a stranger. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. He shifted beneath the nearest streetlamp and detached the envelope from the champagne bottle. Tearing it open, he removed a single sheet of paper and read:
The Challenge of Inspiration
Speedwell 711
There was nothing else typed on the paper apart from the time allowance: one hour. He held the sheet up to the light, and even as he did so it broke in two. What the hell was it supposed to mean? It would take a special kind of inspiration to figure this one out. Clairvoyance, more like. All he knew was that he had barely managed to solve the last clue in time, and now had exactly fifty-eight minutes left to solve this one.
As he looked up into the sky and forced his breathing to a slower rate, the rain began pumping down from the clouds in earnest.
Chapter 22
Mr Pink
Okay, the hour had started, but was this all he had to go on? As far as he knew, there was no area of London called Speedwell. Perhaps there had been in the year 711. This had to be a history question. He picked up the bottle of champagne and examined the label. Non-vintage, no year or corresponding serial number. Möet & Chandon, nothing unusual there.
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