by Mike Ashley
Meanwhile, the combination of being branded incompetent, a dim-wit, having a finger poked in his breast bone and being blasted with the notion that theft ranked higher than murder was doing little to enhance the inspector’s opinion of Chilton. Especially since the accusations were being made in front of the Hon. Member for Knightsbridge & Chelsea.
“What Mr Westlake is forgetting, sir,” he told Orville, “is that apart from Lewis Buckard playing him for a sucker over the publicity, he’d borrowed money from him totalling nearly one hundred pounds, which he apparently had no intention of repaying, and we know he was holding out on him.”
He indicated the velvet-draped easel as he read from the press.
“. . . the likes of which has never been on public display before in this country – a portrait so daring, so scandalous that he’s keeping it under velvet until the official opening. ‘Revelation’, Mr Buckard called it.”
With a flourish that could only be described as smug, he whisked off the velvet.
Revelation indeed. Six pair of eyes gaped at the empty frame.
Teddy Hardcastle let out a soft laugh.
“B-but—” Chilton couldn’t find words to express what he felt.
“Well, I say!” Orville could.
The inspector rubbed his jaw for what seemed like an hour, pausing only to glower at Chilton in the way a lioness might watch her marked zebra leap the gorge into safety.
“Do you suppose,” he asked eventually, “that it was within Mr Buckard’s character to pull a fast one to drum up publicity? That there never was a scandalous portrait to unveil?”
Five voices responded as one, the verdict unanimous. Such a stunt was well within Boucard’s capabilities, they replied.
Cue more jaw-rubbing by His Majesty’s servant.
“Whoever killed Mr Buckard did so by holding the weapon in this—” he held up one of numerous soft cloths used in the gallery to dust the frames “ – to avoid leaving fingerprints. Unfortunately, we have no witnesses to say they saw anyone go in or come out of this room.”
“Why would they?” Orville asked reasonably. “We were all facing the podium, inspector, anxiously awaiting the moment when the doors to the exhibition would open and we could be one of the first to see, and hopefully grab a slice of, this new and prodigious young talent.”
“There were nearly eighty people crammed into my gallery,” Chilton snapped, “and not all of them with gilt-edged invites, I might add. You mark my words, one of those low-lifes killed Louis.”
The inspector turned his scowl on Teddy Hardcastle, making it clear who was responsible for diverting precious resources on this ridiculous wild goose chase when the police had had it sussed all along. With a loud “harrumph” he stomped back into the gallery, trailed by Chilton and Orville, with Gloria adding poise to the rear and leaving Fizzy alone with Teddy once more. This time, though, the silence between them stretched to infinity.
“The question,” he said at last, “isn’t who killed Louis Boucard, is it?”
“No?” Frogs croak louder, she thought.
“No.” He let the wall take his weight at the shoulder. “The question is, why should two people want to kill the same man.”
Turning out of the gallery into the glorious midsummer sunshine, a mischievous breeze whisked off Gloria’s hat and carried it halfway down Mayfair. Biff, of course, would have tackled it before it had gone fifteen yards, but Biff was already ensconced in Jo-Jo’s Jazz Cellar sinking his second martini and by the time the Hon. Member for K&C had picked up sufficient speed, a Ford with an unnecessarily heavy foot on its accelerator had flattened Gloria’s masterpiece right between the tulle and the rosebuds. Another time and the group would have hooted with laughter. Today, though, a man’s life had been taken and the crushing, in an instant, of something so vibrant and bright stood for all that had happened.
On the other hand, it’s an ill wind. Fizzy couldn’t help but notice the look of gratitude and affection that Gloria shot her husband as handed the battered titfer back to his wife and her heart gladdened. He was a good egg, the Hon. Member, and whilst he wasn’t – and would never be – the love of her friend’s life, she’d always felt he deserved more than mere recognition.
“Well?” A long stride fell into step alongside her, its fedora angled low over one half of his forehead.
“Any more thoughts?”
In front of them, Orville had offered a chivalrous arm to his wife and although Fizzy had hoped for a similar offer from Teddy, none came. She adjusted her beads, smoothed her drop waistline, tucked her clutch bag under her arm and thought, who cares about floppy hair anyway?
“I mean,” he added evenly, “you must know it’s one of us.’
“Don’t you mean two of us?”
Dammit, Pekingese dogs don’t snap that hard, but if Teddy Hardcastle noticed, it didn’t show.
“Foxy called him a cad and a bounder,” he said, “and not without justification. Did you know Boucard conned him out of five hundred pounds?”
“How much?”
To an illustrator of children’s books, that was a fortune, and Fizzy calculated that she’d have to work until she was a hundred and twenty-eight to cover that kind of spare cash. Oh, Foxy, Foxy, what have you done . . . ?
“We’ve already heard the inspector’s case against Chilton,” Teddy said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.
Pity, because they were nice hands, with just the right amount of crisp, dark hairs on the back, and she’d pictured them tooling, stamping, making intricate mosaics of metal and leather. Perhaps, in his painstaking artisan mind, magazine illustrators came in on a level with doodlers?
“Also, our Parisian friend helped himself to a whole pile of Bubble’s jewels in, quote, payment for services rendered, unquote. He derided Catspaw’s cartoons in the press, got Marriott to underwrite an enterprise that didn’t exist and – this must go no further, please -he also got Kitty Gardener pregnant. That’s the reason she zipped off to Zurich in the spring.”
“Not a poster designer’s convention, then?’
“There’s a clinic that deals with these things—”
She didn’t dare ask how he knew.
“ – and it’s common knowledge that Lulu was engaged to friend Louis until she found him in bed with Bubbles, and you know how passionately Biff feels about his sister’s honour. Damme,” he added lightly, “if the list ain’t just about endless.”
“Aren’t you’re forgetting someone else with a grudge against Boucard?” Fizzy asked as they reached the steps of the Cellar. “Someone, for instance, like you?”
Ahead of them, Orville was tipping the doorman and Chilton was checking in his boater, but Teddy remained behind on the steps.
“You don’t say.”
“Oh, but I do say.” Suddenly the sunshine seemed terribly bright. “I don’t know where you gathered your gossip from—”
“Information,” he corrected mildly. “We called it information in the Intelligence.” Adding, in response to her involuntary raising of eyebrows, “There was a lot to sort out after the Armistice.”
The hundreds, no thousands, of atrocities committed after the surrender flashed through her mind as it occurred to her that maybe that’s what inspired soldiers to become bookbinders. Intricate, absorbing, it makes one forget . . .
She coughed. “Anyway, don’t think I don’t know that Louis got your kid brother hooked on a certain white powdery substance.”
And him only sixteen, poor sap.
“I see,” Teddy said slowly. “So which do you have me pegged for? The puncture wound, the blunt object or both?”
Fizzy took a step back up the stairs to meet him square in the eye.
“Louis Boucard,” she said stiffly, “was a man with neither scruples nor conscience, but reasons to hate aren’t motives for murder, and even if they were, then the killer would surely choose somewhere more private, wouldn’t they, where they’re more likely to get away with it?”
Down in the Jazz Cellar, it looked like a tornado had swept through the place, with the contents of handbags and pockets spilling over every table and chair as the police searched everyone who’d been in the gallery in an effort to find the missing portrait of a young woman wearing nothing but a painted Venetian mask. The sombre mood quickly gave way to hilarity as photographs fell out of wallets showing girls who were definitely not the title-holders’ wives along with two cream buns discovered in the kitbag of a woman who constantly bored people rigid with tales of her regimented diet. But no paintings of women in masks!
Having been officially declared a A Snitched-Portrait-Free Zone, Fizzy found a sudden need to sit down. As shaking hands slotted a cigarette in its holder, she found herself met with the usual click of a dozen offers for light and one noticeable absence.
“I say, Fizzy, are you free for the opera on Saturday?” Biff wanted to know. “Well, how about the Saturday after?”
“Tough luck, old man,” Marriott cut in, “because I’ve already got my offer in for a spin down to the seaside in the old jaloppy. What d’you say, old girl? Are you up for it?”
“Excuse me.”
She had to pass Teddy to reach the powder room, but managed to do it without meeting his eye, though suddenly, there seemed to be something wrong with her breathing. Just not enough air in the club. Once inside the pink painted sanctuary, she sank against the door, the feathers on her white silk cloche hat fluttering with each tremble that she gave.
“Goodness, darling.”
Gloria, a vision in her customary cream silk, stopped abruptly from the business of applying lipstick to her perfect pout.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
A hundred ghosts, Fizzy thought, recalling laughter, first jobs, second babies. Telegrams –
Her legs felt like they’d been filleted. There was no blood in her veins. None at all.
“That gust of wind gave it away,” she said quietly.
The lipstick in Gloria’s hand faltered, but only momentarily.
“In all the years I’ve known you,” Fizzy continued, “you’ve always worn wide-brimmed hats, Gloria, but the one thing they need that a cloche doesn’t is a hat pin.”
Not an ice pick.
Louis Boucard was killed with a hat pin.
“And when the wind took yours down the street, I knew.”
As did Teddy Hardcastle.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “I presume it was because of your affair?”
Gloria swallowed. “I went in to that with my eyes wide open, darling, because whatever other faults Louis might have had, he . . . well, let’s just say he didn’t have them in the bedroom department.”
Fizzy felt it best to let that one pass.
“But he used you as a subject?”
That was his great “Revelation” – and what greater dynamite for an advertising campaign than the wife of a respected politician on public display?
“Like the press said, he only ever paints nudes,” Gloria said ruefully. “But the treachery is that he painted me while I slept. I hadn’t an inkling until he started blackmailing me – he was always in arrears with the bookies.”
“He wanted more, I suppose?”
“No.”
Gloria fixed her perpetually sad eyes on her friend.
“Orville’s positively swimming in lolly and quite frankly the amount I was paying Louis, Orville didn’t even notice. Another frock, another hat – he didn’t question it. No, the trouble started once people began to appreciate the genius of Louis’s work. You see, the two things my lover wanted most in life were to be rich and famous, and that’s when he decided to unveil his masterpiece. To propel himself into the limelight.”
She drew herself up to her full height.
“Me, I could have ridden the storm, I’ve ridden worse, and the girls are too young to understand. But Orville, darling – Orville’s a good man, and to see him publicly humiliated as a cuckold . . . Well, he’d have stood by me, no question, but the scandal would have destroyed him. I couldn’t let Louis do that.’
“So you did the only decent thing? Stabbed him with your hat pin?”
What little colour was left drained from Gloria’s face at the sharpness of her friend’s tone.
“It wasn’t what I intended, believe me. The idea was to sneak in and steal the horrid thing, but when I slipped into the back room, he was collapsed over his precious cocaine and—” She made a brave attempt at a smile. “Typical Louis. Never did know when to stop.”
“Why kill him, Gloria?”
“Why not, darling? If you’d only seen Kitty after she got back from Switzerland! The doctors say she’ll never be able to have another baby, did you know that? And then there’s Foxy. Five hundred pounds, can you imagine? He’d ruined poor Lulu, was blackmailing Bubbles, had said terrible things about Catspaw, so I thought, what the hell.”
Gloria pointed to a spot on the back of her elegant swan neck.
“I read that if you go right between the vertebrae it severs the spinal cord. He was out cold, Fizzy. I swear he never felt a thing, and if you ask me do I regret it, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say it was no worse than putting a rabid dog down.”
Fizzy counted to three.
“Except you couldn’t bring yourself to pull the pin out?”
Gloria shuddered. “Could you?”
Fizzy doubted she could have driven it in in the first place. But then she wasn’t a widow still deeply in love with a dead husband doing the best for her two tiny daughters by marrying someone who worshipped the ground they all walked on. A rich man, moreover, who would do anything to protect them. Anything at all –
“Orville saw you, didn’t he? Orville saw you come out of that room, no doubt ashen and shaking—”
“I didn’t know.” Gloria collapsed onto the stool and buried her head in her hands. “I swear, darling, I had no idea, not until they said he’d been hit over the head with that panther.”
It didn’t take much working out, really. Orville saw his wife come out of the back room and wanted to know why Louis was upsetting his wife. What went through his head when he saw Louis dead and his wife’s hatpin sticking out of his neck? Fizzy swallowed. Not such a dull stick, after all. Quite the hero, in fact, because it was Orville who pulled out the weapon, then disguised the method of murder by bringing the black marble panther down on his head.
“What did you do with the incriminating canvas?” Fizzy asked. “Everyone’s been searched.”
A hint of colour returned to Gloria’s cheeks. “What I planned from the outset.” She opened her bag to reveal a pair of nail scissors. “I cut it into tiny pieces and flushed it back to the sewer where it belongs.”
Congratultions to Chilton Westlake, Fizzy thought. He’d been very insistent about having all mod cons installed at the gallery!
“What are you going to do now, darling?” Gloria asked.
This time Fizzy counted to ten. Then ten more.
“About what?” she replied steadily. “I only came in here to adjust my suspenders. This left one’s digging in like the blazes.”
She swallowed two tablets for migraine.
“Is it my fault we ended up talking for ages about what hats we might be wearing for Ascot?”
It was gone midnight when the Set finally tumbled out of the Cellar, leaving Jo-Jo one very happy proprietor, having trousered twice the usual takings. The moon was full and waxy, inspiring stars to twinkle, cats to yowl and Foxy Fairfax to treat Londoners with a loud rendition of Danny Boy.
“Fancy putting on the old nosebag with me, Fizzy?” Marriott asked, with a hopeful twiddle of the yellow rose in his buttonhole. “Only there’s this little French place I know round the corner that serves up some pretty nifty proteins and starch.”
“We could all go,” Biff sai
d, elbowing Marriott out of the way.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll give the roasts and boileds a miss tonight, chaps. I rather fancy an early night is in order.”
And besides. There was a cold, twisted knot deep inside that wouldn’t let her eat if she tried.
“Don’t be a wet blanket, sweetheart,” Kitty said, pouring Bubbles into the back of her car. “There’s plenty of room with us girls.”
“I know!” Biff nodded towards his convertible parked with its usual insouciance half on, half off the kerb whilst managing to completely block a back alley. “Let’s all go to the Kitty Kat Klub!”
“Good idea,” Bubbles and Kitty chorused together.
“It won’t be the first time you’ve sat on my knee, Fizzy,” Catspaw said.
“No, but it’d be the first time she’s sat on mine, so don’t be greedy, old man,” Chilton retorted.
“Actually,” a voice rumbled beneath a fedora set at a rakish (some might say dignified) angle, “the lady’s already accepted a lift.”
“Dammit, Squiffy, you always get the pretty ones,” Catspaw wailed, as Biff revved up the engine. “See you up there, then, what?”
“Twenty minutes,” Teddy promised, as the convertible cranked off the kerb with a splutter. Across the way, Orville was opening the door of his Rolls for Gloria and Teddy watched impassively as the Hon. Member settled himself behind the wheel and purred off.
“Happy endings all round, then,” he murmured.
“Not for Louis Boucard,” Fizzy said.
Teddy pursed his lips, but only briefly. “True, but let’s face it, the world’s one scoundrel lighter and none the worse for it, and what odds the police make six wrong arrests before they stuff the file in the ‘Unsolved’ archives and forget it?”
“Is that your definition of happy ending?”
“Ask Chilton. He’ll make four times as much dosh with his prodigy dead and how fortunate there was no scandal to come out, that velvet-covered easel being nothing more than a practical joke and all that.”
“Oh, that sort of happy ending.”
Teddy leaned against the brickwork and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Actually,” he said quietly. “I was rather thinking of Chilton’s missing exhibit and the matter of true love running smooth.”