The Kill Fee

by Fiona Veitch Smith

  “You mean Mr Garfield,” she chastised.

  “Sorry, yes, Mr Garfield.” Vicky looked at her feet and muttered: “And I’m sorry about Miss Marconi too.”

  “What about her?” Poppy slapped her hand to her mouth. Oh no! She’d forgotten about Delilah. She’d forgotten to telephone as she’d promised to tell Delilah the name of the murder victim at Oscar’s – to assure her it wasn’t Adam.

  “Mrs Bradshaw and me couldn’t stop her. When she woke up she wanted to know where you were. We told her what you’d said about telephoning from the club. She said she couldn’t wait for that and would go and see for herself. We couldn’t stop her, miss, I swear. If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs Bradshaw. She’ll tell you. We tried our best. We –”

  Poppy patted Vicky’s shoulder. “It’s all right. It’s not your fault. The whole British Army couldn’t keep Delilah from doing what she wants to do. Did she say where exactly she was going?”

  “She didn’t, miss. I’m sorry.”

  Poppy sighed. That’s all she needed. A hysterical Delilah trying to find Adam – a man who may or may not have just killed someone in a cellar in Chelsea. Poppy held the files to her chest. She needed to get to work. There was no point trying to track down Delilah. She’d no doubt go to Oscar’s and find out that Adam was not the victim. Hopefully that would calm her down and she would go home. Her flat was just a couple of blocks up the road. She would telephone Aunt Dot and ask Miss King to pop down and see if she could find her. Yes, that’s what she would do.

  Vicky was still looking at her anxiously.

  Poppy smiled. “Don’t worry, Vicky, you did your best. And thank you for these files. You’ve been a grand help.”

  Vicky flushed at the compliment and the forgiveness it implied. “Thank you, Miss Denby. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Poppy smiled. “A cup of coffee would be lovely. Can you bring it to Mr Garfield’s desk?” she asked.

  “Of course, miss. And I’ll bring one for him as well, shall I? Do you know how he likes it?”

  Pleased that her lesson in tolerance had been taken on board, Poppy gave Vicky the coffee order and then opened the door to the newsroom. Through the nicotine haze she spotted Ike Garfield on the telephone. After fielding a few concerned queries from some of the other journalists, she sat in the spare chair at his desk to wait for him.

  He finished his call at the same time as Vicky arrived with the coffee. He looked surprised. “Thank you, Miss Thompson; that’s very kind of you.”

  Vicky flushed. “You’re welcome, Mr Garfield, sir.” Then she hastened a retreat.

  He gave a knowing look at Poppy, then pulled up when he saw her cheek.

  “Heavens, Poppy! What happened?”

  Poppy sighed, leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee. She waited a moment for the sweet, warm brew to work its magic and then she launched into her explanation.

  As she wrapped up she finished with: “Rollo said to tell you you’re in charge.”

  He grinned, his large square teeth like piano keys. “I know. That was Yasmin Reece-Lansdale on the blower. Rollo used his one telephone call to bring her in as his solicitor. She’s working on getting him out now.”

  “On instruction to not work too quickly, I bet,” said Poppy, winking at Ike.

  Ike laughed. “You know Rollo too well, Miss Denby.”

  Poppy gave a lopsided grin, trying not to engage her cheek muscles on the bruised side of her face. “So what did she say?”

  “Rollo’s fine. He managed to talk to Oscar in the Black Mariah before they were told to shut up by the old bill. It didn’t make sense when I first heard it, but now you’ve told me about the tunnel it does. Oscar says he heard a commotion in the cellar, looked through his peephole and saw Arthur Watts, the barman, having an argument with someone. He couldn’t see who the person was. By the time he got from his office to the cellar, Watts had been attacked and the assailant had disappeared. Oscar had tried to save Watts, but it was too late. He ran out of the cellar to get help, and was seen, covered in blood, by the delivery bloke. Seems like this chappie has it in for Oscar, as he was planning on changing suppliers. Oscar claims he fudged his statement to the police, saying he’d heard Oscar and Watts fighting before Oscar ran out covered in blood. But that couldn’t have happened, because Watts was already fatally wounded by the time Oscar got in. Allegedly.”

  “Allegedly?” asked Poppy, raising her eyebrow over the coffee mug.

  “Well, we’ve only got Oscar’s word for it,” clarified Ike.

  “But Rollo believes him.”

  Ike nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, he does. But there is no evidence to support it.”

  “Isn’t there?” asked Poppy. “Then where’s the weapon? If Oscar stabbed Watts with a… do they know what it was yet?”

  Ike nodded. “Probably a rapier again. The medical officer will still need to confirm it.”

  Poppy nodded in agreement. “Well, if Oscar stabbed Watts with a rapier, where is it? There was no sword when Rollo and I were there. The police could already have taken it, of course…”

  “They didn’t. Apparently the murder weapon has not yet been found.”

  “So that backs up Oscar’s story of the third man,” concluded Poppy. “And of course there was the tunnel.”

  Ike put down his empty coffee cup and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “Well done, Miss Denby. I think we have enough for a story.” He chuckled. “The other papers will be going with Rollo Rolandson and Oscar Reynolds being arrested for murder and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. We’ll go with ‘Jazz club murderer escapes through secret tunnel’.”

  Poppy frowned. “I don’t know if Oscar will want that to be made public.”

  Ike pursed his lips. “I’m sorry, Poppy; I can’t ignore it. It’s too strong a story.”

  Poppy sighed. She knew he was right. “Fine. But don’t reveal the location of the tunnel entrance if you don’t have to.”

  Ike smiled. “We don’t have to.” He straightened his notebook and put a sheet of paper in his Remington typewriter. “Right, you work through those files, Poppy, and see what you can come up with. I’ll get the lead done for the morning’s edition.”

  He didn’t wait for her to leave before his fingers started pounding the keyboard.

  CHAPTER 25

  Back at her own desk, and after unsuccessfully trying to telephone Delilah’s flat, Poppy telephoned home and spoke to Miss King – thankfully the bill had now been paid and the phone was reconnected. But Aunt Dot wasn’t there. She was at the hospital, visiting Monsieur Stanislavski. Miss Baylis, the theatre manager, had said she would drop Dot home later. Poppy filled Miss King in on the goings on at Oscar’s and asked her to pop down the road to see if she could find Delilah. The operator had told her the telephone had been disconnected that morning. Poppy thought this odd, but then reminded herself that Delilah was much like her aunt and probably hadn’t gotten around to paying her bill either. After being assured that the sensible and surprisingly daring Miss King would do her best to find Delilah, Poppy put down the telephone and readied herself for work.

  As had become her daily habit Poppy first watered her potted begonia and marvelled at its ability to survive in the smoke-filled newsroom. Neither Poppy’s parents nor Aunt Dot smoked. Grace had enjoyed an occasional cigarette in the garden. Delilah, of course, loved her “ciggies” and used a foot-long tortoiseshell and onyx cigarette holder. It had probably cost the girl – or whoever had bought it for her – more than Poppy would earn in six months at The Daily Globe.

  Delilah earned her own income as an actress, but far exceeding that was her stipend from her rich father and what she inherited after her mother’s death. However, despite being a very wealthy woman, Delilah rarely spent any of her own cash. She didn’t have to, as she was never short of suitors who showered her with gifts. Which was why Poppy and everyone else who knew the young actress
were so surprised at how hard she had fallen for Adam Lane. Delilah had been monogamous since she met the handsome young actor in the summer. Poppy had even caught her flicking through the wedding pages in the latest Vogue, drooling over the photographs of the hitching of actress Beatrice Lillie and Sir Robert Peel.

  Everyone who was anyone, apparently, had been invited to attend, but Delilah had turned it down in favour of a weekend away in Monte Carlo with Adam. That was most unlike Delilah. She would have heart palpitations if she thought she were missing out on the latest gossip and goings-on of high society. Poppy had not been invited, although she had joined the press scrum outside the gates of the churchyard with Daniel. Only the Vogue photographers had been allowed access into the church grounds. And a moving picture photographer too.

  Poppy had later watched the newsreel with Delilah and Aunt Dot at the Electric Cinema in Chelsea. They all declared that Beatrice had looked “scrumptious” and Sir Robert “very spiffing indeed”. Aunt Dot, accompanied by Marjorie Reynolds, had not attended the church service either; there was no wheelchair access and she declared that she would not be carried in front of the Vogue photographers; but she had made it to the reception in the evening.

  Poppy pulled herself up. This was no time to be thinking about society weddings. She straightened the edges of the five Jazz Files on her desk, then checked her watch and noted that it was half past three. It had been a jam-packed day. First the morning meeting with Marjorie Reynolds at the Empire Tea Rooms, followed by the intriguing discussion in St Bride’s Church, where Poppy heard about the murdered Russian family, the missing British spy Ruth Broadwood, and the possibility that Andrei Nogovski had murdered Selena. And then Delilah’s sudden visit with the news that Adam had “disappeared” after a sword fight with a mysterious man: all of this before her near arrest at Oscar’s Jazz Club! Poppy sighed; it had been an exhausting day and it wasn’t nearly over. She would just have to keep going on caffeine and adrenaline.

  She shuffled through the five files and extracted Vasili Safin’s. Only a single sheet of notes and a photograph – taken on the steps of the Russian embassy when Safin had arrived to assume the post of interim ambassador and trade commissar three weeks earlier. He looked impatient to get inside, his mouth set above his goatee. The notes told her very little. He was a widower, a close associate of the leading Bolshevik Josef Stalin and a card-carrying member of the Russian Communist Party. He had, apparently, spent a number of years in a Siberian work camp due to his involvement as an agitator in the aborted 1905 revolution. His wife had sadly died in his absence. He had no children. As far as his London connections went, none were recorded. Not much there then, other than a good reason to hate the Russian royals. Let’s see if there’s anything on his partner in crime, thought Poppy, and turned to Andrei Nogovski.

  She reminded herself that this was a Jazz File containing celebrity gossip and not a Secret Service dossier. She did not expect to find evidence in here linking the Russian to the deaths of the royals, but she did hope to find something linking him – or perhaps Safin – to Selena and the Fabergé eggs.

  Inside was a single typed sheet of paper and two photographs. The sheet confirmed what she already knew about Nogovski: he had arrived in London in early September to take up an appointment as a security consultant for the Russian embassy. Poppy noted that the timing was unusual, as the old ambassador – a White Russian – had still been in residence at the time. It was only with recent events in the Crimea, where it seemed near certain that the Whites would lose the civil war, that the ambassador had resigned and been temporarily replaced by Comrade Safin. So why had a Bolshevik been given the appointment of security consultant? Perhaps it was a compromise on behalf of the interim government in Moscow. Or perhaps it was because of the next note – that Nogovski had formerly been a member of the tsar’s not-so-secret police – that he had been appointed. He knew the royals and he knew the revolutionaries. He was uniquely placed to deal with both sides. There was nothing to indicate why Nogovski had changed from White to Red; only that he had.

  Then there was a paragraph about his personal life. Or lack of it. He was thirty-four years old and single, or at least with no known family. The author of the report – Rollo? Ike? Ah, it was both of them; the initials RR and IG appeared at the bottom of the page – had noted with some disappointment that there were no known “dalliances”. He had not been seen at any celebrity parties apart from events hosted by the Russian embassy.

  He had, however, been part of the welcoming party to greet the Romanov refugees off the ship from Malta. And there was a photograph to accompany it. Nogovski was standing next to a man Poppy assumed was the former ambassador. They were being introduced to Empress Maria Federovna and her entourage, including Prince Felix Yusopov and Princess Irina. Poppy could tell little from the static image, and wished there was a moving image with subtitles. Was Felix looking directly at Nogovski? Was Nogovski looking back? It appeared that way, but it was hard to know for sure. And what if they were? Were they summing one another up? Did they know each other from back in Russia? They must have if Nogovski formerly worked for the royals. She wondered when Nogovski had “turned” – the file didn’t say – and she had no way of knowing which side he was on when Rasputin was murdered. Had he been involved in the cover-up? Had he been part of the police detail that had cleared Yusopov and his fellow assassins of murder and declared there was no charge to answer? She made a note to try to get some more information from Ivan Molanov. The Russian archivist would hopefully be able to fill in some of these gaps – if he was willing to talk about it. It would probably be wise for her to wait for Rollo to get out of the slammer and ask him to talk to his old friend.

  Poppy picked up the second photograph and was surprised to see that it was another photograph of Princess Selena in Paris back in 1912, starring in the George Bernard Shaw play. It was the photograph of her standing with a bouquet of flowers next to Vladimir Lenin – it must have been misfiled. It belonged in the Selena file, which Poppy still had in her drawer from yesterday’s research. She pulled out the dead woman’s file and took a paper clip to attach the photograph to the duplicate.

  But then she noticed that the photographs were not exactly the same. The second picture had been taken from a different angle and included some people in the background behind Selena. She turned the photograph over and read the caption: “Princess Selena Romanova Yusopova and her security guards with Vladimir Lenin, Paris, June 1912. Arms and the Man run, Paris Opera House.” Security guards? She hadn’t seen them in the other photograph. There were two of them: one a slim, middle-aged man with a thin face, the other… the other…

  Poppy scrabbled around in her drawer to find a magnifying glass. She peered through the glass at the younger, bearded man and tried to look beyond the facial hair. Could that be Andrei Nogovski? She looked intently into his eyes and for a moment it felt as though he were looking back. A shiver ran down her spine. She had looked into those eyes before – and they into hers – at the press conference at the embassy last week. It was indeed a younger Andrei Nogovski in his mid-twenties. Of course it was. This was his file. But why had it been put there? He was not named in the caption. Rollo and Ike were not likely to have picked it up. It must have been Ivan. Again, Poppy made a note to speak to the man.

  So, Andrei Nogovski had been Selena’s bodyguard back in the day. How interesting. He hadn’t mentioned it. But why would he? Their conversation last night had surrounded Delilah and her father, and the possibility that the police would be pursuing that line of enquiry. She wondered for a moment who had set the police looking in that direction. Could it have been Andrei Nogovski himself? She wouldn’t put it past the man.

  Poppy slipped a page into her Remington typewriter and typed up the new information she had received on Nogovski that morning from Marjorie Reynolds, initialled it PD and added it to the file. Then she closed it.

  Her stomach rumbled. It had been a long time since breakfast an
d she had missed lunch with all of the drama at Oscar’s. She didn’t really have time to take a break. Then she spotted Vicky walking across the newsroom, carrying a bouquet of flowers.

  “Oooh, Vicky, they’re lovely. A secret admirer?”

  Vicky blushed. “No, Miss Denby. I found them in Mr Molanov’s bin and thought I’d rescue them. They’ve still got life in them.”

  Poppy frowned. “Why were they in Mr Molanov’s bin?”

  Vicky shrugged. “I don’t know. I couldn’t ask him. He’s gone out.” She paused, then asked: “You don’t think he’ll mind me taking them, do you?”

  Poppy smiled. “Why should he? He’d already thrown them away, hadn’t he? I wonder who they were from. Was there any note?”

  “Nothing,” said Vicky and went into the little kitchenette just off the newsroom, where the journalists made their coffee and tea. When she emerged with the flowers she placed them on top of a filing cabinet. “There. That brightens the place up, doesn’t it?”

  Poppy agreed that it did, then asked Vicky to pop out and get her a sandwich. Vicky, always eager to please “Miss Denby”, said she’d get right to it.

  Poppy’s stomach grumbled again. She set aside the Nogovski file and then picked up Arthur Watts’s. There were only two items in it: a half-page of text with the initials IG, and Daniel’s photograph of the exhibition with Watts serving a line of gentlemen, including, Poppy could now see, Adam Lane. The caption on the back confirmed that it was Watts.

  Poppy picked up the file and strolled over to Ike’s desk. The political editor was still pounding the keys.

  “Ike, did you write up this Jazz File on Watts?”

  Ike nodded, his mind still on the story he was writing.

  “Where did you get the information?”

  “My contact in the police. All they told me was that he’d been a person of interest for a while and that they suspected him of being a fence. But they had no hard evidence. Sorry there isn’t more.”