‘Like what?’
He is used to dealing with women who half-heartedly – or incompetently – model themselves on Hollywood stars, but this woman is the genuine article. She sweeps into the foyer dressed like an exotic bird of paradise, with a caravan of porters carrying the luggage in her wake, strolls boldly up to the desk and says, ‘Hi, I’m Mel … Mary Edwards.’
A lesser man would have been struck speechless, but Jimmy merely gives her one of his special smiles and says, ‘Welcome, Mrs Edwards.’
‘That’s Miss Edwards,’ she replies, with her American directness. ‘Is my suite ready?’
‘Yes, Miss Edwards, it most certainly is.’
‘Did the manager – Mr Mansfield, that’s his name, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right, Miss Edwards.’
‘Did Mr Mansfield fix it?’
He doesn’t know what she means – and says so.
‘Mr Mansfield said that the best suite in the hotel was already booked, but he’d see if he could arrange it so that it became available,’ the woman explains. ‘He sort of made it sound as if it was a done deal.’
Jimmy glances down at the register, and sees that the Princess Beatrice suite is very firmly occupied by Sir Grenville Todd, a local property magnate.
He sighs. Bloody typical of Mansfield, he thinks – dodging the bullet himself and leaving his underlings to take the impact.
‘I’m … err … afraid that the Princess Beatrice suite is still occupied, but the Prince Alfred is almost as good,’ he says.
The woman seems to inflate – a bird of paradise no more, she has become an aggressive peacock, intent on getting its way.
‘Almost as good?’ she said imperiously. ‘Almost as good! Do you have any idea who I …’
She stops suddenly, as if she’s realised she was about to say something she’d regret later, and slowly she deflates, until she is an outraged peacock no more, but instead his mild-mannered mate.
‘I’m sure the Prince Alfred suite will be just great,’ she says lamely.
‘So the reason you remember her is partly because of the way that she was dressed, and partly because she looked like she was about to throw a wobbly with you?’ Meadows asked.
‘Yes,’ Jimmy admitted, ‘but even without those two things I would have remembered her, because she was beautiful.’
‘Really?’ Meadows said. ‘Of course, I’ve only seen her dead, but even so, I don’t think most men would have said that about her.’
‘But I’m not most men,’ Jimmy said. ‘When I look at a woman, I can see the beauty that shines through from the soul.’
It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t need to use his standard line of patter with Meadows, because she genuinely was good looking.
‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘some lucky women have it all ways. Like you, for example – you have a beautiful soul, but you also have a beautiful face.’
He could see that the compliment had flustered her, and that she was trying her hardest not to blush. This was going to be easy, and it might be wise to check that he had an ample supply of rubber johnnies in his wallet.
‘So, Jimmy, could you tell me what happened when she checked in,’ Meadows suggested.
Bentley shrugged. ‘Nothing particularly happened. I registered her, and that was about it.’
‘But you didn’t take her passport off her, did you? I know that for a fact, because it’s not in the hotel safe.’
Jimmy Bentley began to get a vague, slightly uncomfortable, feeling that something was going wrong.
‘No, I didn’t take it,’ he said. ‘There was no need to.’
‘Why was that – because she signed a blank credit-card slip?’
‘No, because she paid in cash – a month in advance.’
‘Isn’t that unusual?’
‘It is, rather, but she explained that was the way she preferred to do business, and since that came within the hotel’s guidelines …’
‘But you had a look at her passport, didn’t you? That’s a legal requirement when you’re dealing with aliens – and I would imagine that it’s company policy as well.’
‘Err … yes, well naturally, I did take a good look at the passport,’ Jimmy said, unconvincingly.
‘You’re lying to me, Jimmy,’ Meadows said – and her tone was suddenly exactly like his bloody mother’s had been, that time she’d caught him in his bedroom, looking at pictures of semi-naked women and experimenting with his semi-erect penis.
‘I … err …’ the clerk said.
‘I … err …?’ Meadows repeated. ‘Would you like to be a little more explicit, Jimmy?’
‘I just need to see your passport, Miss Edwards,’ Jimmy says. ‘It’s one of the hotel’s rules.’
The woman – Mary Edwards – smiles at him.
‘Of course,’ she says.
She opens her handbag – it is a rather large one – and rummages round inside for nearly a minute.
She is still smiling when she looks up again.
‘It isn’t here,’ she says, ‘and now I come to think about it, I remember putting it into one of the suitcases after I’d cleared immigration. I thought it would be much safer there, you see.’
‘Then perhaps you can open the suitcase in question, and take it out,’ Jimmy suggests.
Miss Edwards frowns. ‘The problem is, I can’t remember which suitcase it was, and,’ she chuckles, ‘there are rather a lot of them to check on, as you can see for yourself. Couldn’t it wait until I’ve unpacked? Then maybe you could come up to my suite, and I could show it to you there.’
He can already feel her heels – crossed behind his backside – digging into his spine.
‘Yes, I suppose it could wait,’ he says.
‘She didn’t ask you up to her suite, did she?’ Meadows asked. ‘Not that first day – not ever?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ Jimmy Bentley agreed, staring down at the desk in what might have been shame, and what might have been embarrassment – and was possibly both.
‘And you didn’t like to remind her of it, because she might have taken any reminder as an indication that that you were gasping for her body, instead of it being the other way round – and you’re far too proud to have any woman think that.’
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the booking clerk said, reddening.
Meadows laughed – loudly and uninhibitedly.
‘She played you, Jimmy-boy,’ she said. ‘She wrapped you around her little finger, and you didn’t even know it was happening.’ She paused for a second. ‘And by the way, the answer is no.’
‘I don’t even know what the question is.’
Meadows laughed again – and this time there was a Shakespearean bawdiness to it.
‘Of course you do – and just to make the situation as clear as can be, I want you to know that you’ve as much chance of getting me into bed as a one-legged man has of winning an arse-kicking competition.’
The bedroom in the Prince Alfred suite was twice the size of Paniatowski’s own bedroom, but then she was only a detective chief inspector, and the woman who had rented this suite had been a …
Had been a what?
Paniatowski had absolutely no idea.
She slid back the sliding door on the long wardrobe to reveal Miss Edward’s collection of dresses and coats.
‘Jesus!’ Beresford said. ‘How long do you think she was planning to stay here? A year?’
There certainly were a lot of clothes, Paniatowski agreed, but what interested her more was how they had been organised. She wondered if Beresford would spot it too.
‘I’m no expert on women’s clothes, boss,’ he said, showing that he had noticed, ‘but it seems to me as if the clothes on the left-hand side are different to the ones on the right.’
‘In what way are they different?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Well, the ones on the left-hand side are the sort of clothes women wear if they’ve got dolled
up for a Saturday night out in the best room in the Drum and Monkey. Don’t get me wrong, they’re smart enough in their way, but unless the woman wearing them was an absolute stunner, I’d probably not even notice them – if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Paniatowski agreed, remembering that Meadows had said that the clothes the dead woman had been wearing – and which had undoubtedly come from this side of the wardrobe – were ‘respectable’.
‘The ones on the right-hand side would grab my attention right away, even if the woman wearing them wasn’t much to look at,’ Beresford continued. ‘I don’t know whether that’s because they’re expensive, or because of the way they’re cut, but they look different somehow.’
Paniatowski inspected the labels on two of the dresses on the right-hand side. One said Saks Fifth Avenue, the other said Bergdorf Goodman.
Now why would a victim have two different – and completely contrasting wardrobes, she wondered.
She was beginning to suspect they were the tools of her trade.
THREE
The Drum and Monkey was the pub that progress had passed by with barely a glance. Other pubs in Whitebridge had had all their walls knocked down and become one large room, but the Drum still maintained different rooms for different sorts of clients: the vault, where only men went, and foul language was not only permissible but almost de rigueur; the public bar, where darts were thrown and dominoes played; and the best room, where married couples who no longer had much to say to each other went to celebrate their nights out together in uneasy silence, and courting couples – who knew that they would never be like that – went to plan their future. Other pubs had garish carpets laid throughout; the Drum had bare boards in the vault, linoleum tiles in the public bar, and a plain dark brown carpet in the best room. It was a slightly scruffy place, but it was comfortably scruffy – and it served the best pint in Whitebridge.
It had been the combination of scruffiness and alcoholic excellence which had caused Charlie Woodend, when he first returned to Whitebridge as a chief inspector, to select the Drum as his base. Woodend believed that a good detective needed to be able to make the occasional imaginative leap in his thinking, that these leaps were best fuelled by several pints of Thwaites bitter, and the ideal location for such a process to take place was the corner table of the public bar in the Drum. That was the table at which he and his team sat from his very first case to the day he retired – and his successor, Monika Paniatowski, had maintained the tradition, because it had worked for Charlie and it seemed to be working for her.
There were four of them – the core team – at the table that night, though not all of them were following Woodend’s maxim that bitter was the brain’s natural lubricant. Paniatowski was a vodka drinker – Polish vodka through choice, though the Iron Curtain restrictions meant that was not always possible. Meadows, who, but for her bizarre night-time activity, was almost a puritan, neither drank nor smoked, and seemed to derive a deep pleasure from sipping bitter lemon which left the rest of the team baffled. The two men, however, followed faithfully in Woodend’s footsteps, though the younger of them – DC Jack Crane – had only met the legendary Charlie once.
‘First things first,’ Paniatowski said, when the waiter had deposited the drinks and gone away again. ‘Have all the guests and employees of the Royal Vic been interviewed?’
Beresford glanced at his watch. ‘Probably not, but by the time my lads knock off for the night, they will have questioned everybody we know was there around the time Mary Edwards was killed. The problem is there was at least a three-hour gap between the murder and the discovery of the body, so there are bound to be dozens of people who passed through the hotel that we don’t know about.’
‘Some of them – hopefully, all of them – will come forward when they find out we want to talk to them,’ Paniatowski said.
But the television and newspaper appeals would also bring any number of sad and delusional people crawling out of the woodwork and making false claims. Many of these claims would sound so plausible – the lonely and the deranged knew that to get what they wanted, they needed to be cunning – and dozens of man-hours would be wasted in exposing their statements for what they were. Still, it had to be done – there really was no other way.
‘Any promising leads?’ she asked.
But there was not much hope in her voice, because the members of her team were not like the ones on half the other teams operating out of Whitebridge Central – they didn’t hold back information until they could see a way to use it to their own maximum benefit.
No, if Colin had had something juicy, he would have told the rest of them about it the moment they sat down.
Confirming her suspicions, Beresford shook his head. ‘If she’d been staying on a lower floor, where there are lots of rooms, then she – or her killer – might have been noticed by other guests leaving or entering their rooms, but, as you know, there are only two suites on the penthouse level, and the occupant of the other one was away for the day.’
‘She made it so easy for him, didn’t she?’ Paniatowski said, and, without waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘The murder weapon has still to turn up, but there’s a notable gap on the fireside companion in the Prince Alfred suite, so I think we know what we’re looking for.’
‘What’s a fireside companion?’ Crane asked.
‘What’s a fireside companion!’ Beresford repeated, incredulously. ‘Didn’t you have to light the fire when you got home from school, so the house would be nice and warm by the time your mum and dad arrived from work?’
‘No,’ Crane said. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, you certainly have led a charmed life,’ Beresford said.
In addition to thinking that Crane was a good bobby, Colin also liked him as a man, Paniatowski thought. But he did sometimes feel threatened by him, too, because Crane was an acknowledged high-flyer with an M.A. from Oxford University, and there were occasions when Beresford could not resist taking a pop at him.
‘So who did light the fire, young Jack?’ Beresford continued. ‘It surely wasn’t your poor grey-haired old granny, was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Crane said. ‘We didn’t have fires in our house.’
‘So what did you do when it got cold?’
‘The same as I do now – turn the central heating on.’
‘Oh,’ Beresford said, sounding deflated.
If Colin had a weakness, Paniatowski thought, it was that he sometimes found it difficult to project himself into other people’s lives, and – the other side of the same coin, this – he didn’t quite believe that his own experiences weren’t universal. Jack Crane was young, highly educated and clearly middle class. It should have come as no surprise to Beresford that the path Crane had followed was different to the one trodden by a working-class, secondary modern boy like himself, who, in addition to everything else, was almost a generation older.
Do I do that? she wondered. Do I say things which make me seem old and naïve about the wider world?
‘You can’t blame the boss if she doesn’t always get the point,’ she heard an imaginary Crane say to an imaginary Meadows in her head. ‘I mean, she’s not exactly old, but she was born before the war.’
Dear God – that was a chilling thought!
‘A fireside companion is a stand from which hang a hearth brush, a small shovel, a pair of tongs and a poker,’ she explained to Crane. ‘It’s the poker that’s missing.’
‘I’m just trying to picture the scene,’ Beresford said. ‘Given that Mary Edwards was knocked into her chair, they must both have been standing in the centre of the room, talking to each other. Right?’
‘Right,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘And then she says something which drives him into a sudden rage. He looks around for something to kill her with—’
‘To threaten her with,’ Meadows interrupted. ‘I think at that point he only wanted to threaten her.’
‘What makes
you say that?’
‘You don’t think logically when you’re in a rage – and you don’t take your time. You just lash out. Now, if the fireside companion had been right beside him, he might have used it. But it wasn’t. So if he felt the sudden urge to kill her, he’d have strangled her. What he wouldn’t have done was walk over to the fireplace, bend down, pick up the poker, and walk back to where she was standing.’
‘What do you think about that, Colin?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Makes sense,’ Beresford said.
‘If, on the other hand, you’re only going to threaten to kill someone, you need a prop to be really effective,’ Meadows continued. ‘So he goes and gets the poker and waves it in front of her. Which means that at this point he might be angry, but he’s still in control of himself.’
‘But that doesn’t scare her, because if it did, she’d make some effort to escape,’ Paniatowski said. ‘So why doesn’t it scare her?’
‘She thinks she knows him well enough to be sure he’s not going to go through with it,’ Crane said, ‘either because he’s too nice to kill, or because he hasn’t got the balls.’
‘The argument continues, he sees red, and the next thing he knows, she’s sprawled in the chair with her head caved in,’ Beresford said.
The barman leaned over the bar counter. ‘There’s somebody on the phone wants to speak to you, chief inspector,’ he called across the room. ‘Will you take it on the corridor phone, as usual?’
‘Yes, that’ll be fine,’ Paniatowski called back.
She rose to her feet and made her way to the corridor, in which – midway between the stacks of beer crates and the ladies’ toilets – the public telephone was located.
The first thing Fred Mahoney said when she picked up the phone was: ‘What kind of establishment was this Mary Edwards of yours staying in? Was it what you Brits call a boarding house?’
‘No,’ Paniatowski replied, with a sudden feeling of foreboding. ‘It was the best hotel in Whitebridge.’
‘So it’s expensive?’
‘Very, especially if you took a suite, like she did.’
Death in Disguise Page 4