“Nothing for it but to bring my wife along,” I said. “Rather does in the surprise aspect, but there it is.”
“I am sorry we cannot help you.”
“There is always a next time. Thanks very much. Hope I haven’t been a bother.”
“Not at all. Good morning.” She spotted a customer and glided away. I found myself left with Silverhair.
“I’m looking for a girl named Gloria,” I said. “I’m really a plainclothes police officer and—”
“So that’s why she skipped! All I know is that she lived somewhere Culvert Green way. In a hostel of some sort, I think, but I never went there. Police! Coo! I should never have thought it. She seemed such a nice sort of girl. Domremy was her surname, very posh, and she was always ladylike, and never any nasty snide remarks about the other girls. We thought she left because she had an argument with Lady Muck. Police! Well, really!”
I took it that she referred to the magnificent blonde under the title of Lady Muck.
“So Gloria had a dust-up with the supervisor or whatever she’s called,” I said. “You are sure her name was Gloria?”
“Of course I am. Sorry, a customer. Excuse me, please.”
The lead she had given me seemed too promising to ignore. I decided that I would try my luck at Culvert Green. It seemed certain now that Anthony and I had wrongly identified the corpse. My first thought was to telephone Dame Beatrice, but, although I hesitated outside the first public callbox I came to after I had left the shop, I changed my mind. It would be something really to report if I could say that I had actually tracked down Gloria and that she was alive after all.
It then occurred to me that the proper procedure would be to telephone the police, but I soon dismissed that idea, too. All that I could tell them was that an assistant saleswoman at Trends in London had been recognised as Gloria Mundy, that she had left in a hurry and that, although she had disguised herself to some extent, she had kept the name Gloria, had been of the required build, and had been seen some weeks after her supposed death.
If I told the police all this, though, they would need to contact McMaster and, if he decided, after all, to stick to his ghost story, the police undoubtedly would ignore both of us—if, indeed, they did not doubt our sanity or decide that we were trying to perpetrate a hoax at their expense.
I had lunch at a restaurant and took a bus to Culvert Green. It is a pleasant suburb out on the Kent border not all that far from Black-heath. There were streets of small shops, but along the main road the houses had been built as large, middle-class, Victorian family dwellings with front gardens which were far enough from gate to doorway to give some privacy from the curiosity of passers-by.
Most of the houses had basements with their own steep, narrow steps leading to the servants’ entrances and flights of broad stone steps leading up to the front doors. Above the basements the houses rose in three storeys; they had large bay windows on the first floor, large Georgian-type windows on the floor above this, and much smaller, rather mean-looking windows on the top floor.
Some of the houses had been turned into flats, others had become business premises and their owners had taken down the street wall and gates (from which, in any case, the iron railings had been removed during the war) and had concreted what had been the front lawns and turned them into parking-spaces for the workers’ and management’s cars.
The other three houses past which I walked were a YWCA hostel, a hall of residence for college students, and a more imposing mansion than either. This was a guest house called the Clovelly Private Hotel.
From what I had heard of Gloria I thought that this was more likely to be her choice than a YWCA hostel, so I mounted the steps and went in through an open front door which led into a small vestibule. Beyond this were swing doors. I pushed in and on my left there was the reception desk and behind it at a small table a woman and a girl of about nineteen were having a cup of tea.
They did not appear to have noticed my entrance, in spite of the fact that one of the swing doors had given a slight moan, so I coughed to attract attention. The older woman looked up.
“Sorry,” she said, “no vacancies. Residents only, and we’re full.”
“I don’t need accommodation. I am looking for my sister and the place where she worked gave me this address. I am from the Argentine.” (I suppose my subconscious mind brought this country uppermost, since I had been told that Coberley had had business interests there.) “So we have not met for years and she may be married by now. The name is M—” I was about to say Mundy, but caught the word back and substituted “Malvern.”
“No guest of that name here.”
“She wrote to me that she was engaged to a man named Domremy. Would a Mrs. Domremy mean anything to you? As I remember my sister, she was very slightly built and had red hair and a pale complexion. Sometimes she dyed part of her hair black, sometimes all of it was black.”
The woman shook her head, but the girl, who was still seated in the background, said, “It couldn’t be, could it?”
“Couldn’t be what?” asked the woman.
“You know. That case in the papers. It said she had red hair one side of her head and black the other.”
“Of course it couldn’t be her. We don’t get ourselves mixed up with murder and that kind of thing.” She turned to me again. “We don’t know anything about a Miss Malvern or a Mrs. Whatever name you said.” She turned her back on me and went back to her cup of tea.
“One moment,” I said peremptorily.
“Well?”
“I am a police officer. If you know anything whatever about the woman with the red and black hair and do not disclose it, you will be hindering me in the execution of my duty, and that is an indictable offence.”
If either of them had asked me for my credentials at this point, I should have been stymied, but fortunately neither of them thought of it, any more than the girl in Trends had done. The older woman came back to the counter.
“She was here, perhaps, if we’re talking about the same person,” she said, “but please don’t ever mention it, us not wanting the reporters and the notoriety, and her hair was always dark while she was here. She called herself Parkstone and we never saw her with anything but dark-brown hair, not really black.”
“Parkstone?” What imp of mischief had been at work here, I wondered. “When did she leave?”
“Oh, that would have been a fortnight ago.”
“Do you know where she worked?”
“Oh, yes, she worked at Trends in the West End.”
“Did she ever have visitors?”
“Not that I know of. I shouldn’t think her sort would have wanted them if the police wanted her. No wonder she left here, if you were on her track.”
“Did she leave anything behind?”
“Oh, no. We’re fully furnished, so she only took her clothes with her. There was nothing else. Look, we can’t help you, so you’ll keep us out of the papers, won’t you? This place is my livelihood, you see, mine and my daughter’s.” She indicated the girl at the table.
“We are very discreet,” I said. “I shan’t need to trouble you again, I’m sure. Did this Miss Parkstone leave a forwarding address for letters?”
“Oh, no, nothing of that sort. She would have left it with the post-office, I expect.”
I had no idea what to do next. I seemed to have come to a dead end almost as soon as I had started. I walked somewhat disconsolately to the bus stop, but while I stood there I thought of one more thing which I could do, although, in my chastened state of mind, I did not think anything would come of it. I left the bus stop and walked down a side street to the post-office, not really believing for a moment that Gloria would have left an address there if she was on the run, as now seemed more than likely.
It was one of those places which combines postal business with keeping a little shop. This one sold stationery, birthday cards, sellotape, string, paperbacks, pencils and pencil-sharpeners, paperclips, indi
a-rubbers, and other oddments, so I made a few purchases and then went to the post-office counter and bought some stamps.
“I want to send birthday cards to my nieces,” I said, “but they seem to have moved from their hotel. Would you have a forwarding address for Parkstone, Mundy, and Domremy?”
The name Mundy appeared to mean nothing to the elderly woman behind the wire mesh. Perhaps she did not read the papers.
“We have one for Parkstone,” she said. “Where did your niece live? We don’t usually give people’s addresses to strangers.”
“Until fairly recently she was staying at the Clovelly Private Hotel near here.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then. You can’t be a stranger. I’ll write it down for you.”
I began to see how con-men make a living. I took the bit of paper she handed me, thanked her, bought a ball of string and some fancy wrapping paper from the girl who had already served me, added these to my other small purchases, and then bought a carrier bag. My camouflage, I decided, had been foolproof. I tucked away the precious piece of paper and went back to the bus stop.
That evening I wrote to Dame Beatrice to tell her what McMaster had told me and to give her an account of my experiences in Culvert Green. I posted it so that it would go off by the first collection next morning. Then I looked at the piece of paper the woman at the post-office had given me. It bore the address of a house in the little town of Chaynorth in Sussex.
I knew Chaynorth pretty well. One of McMaster’s hotels was just outside it, so I had explored it and all the countryside round it when I was working on the brochures. I promised myself a pleasant day out when I went to make enquiries about the nomadic Parkstone, Domremy, and Gloria Mundy.
14
Unexpected Developments
This time, of course, I took the car. It was an easy and pleasant run from London. I decided to have lunch in the town and then find the house I wanted.
There were two hotels, the White Hart, built on the foundations of an abbey guest-house, and a quiet Georgian building—quiet, that is to say, because it was in a side street and not on the main road through the town—called Bartlemy’s. I suppose I could have gone a little way out and got myself a free, and possibly a better, lunch at McMaster’s hotel, but this seemed rather like scrounging, so I resisted what, I will admit, was a temptation and settled for the White Hart.
The hotel was in the high street opposite the old court house where, as I had stated in the brochure, the assizes used to be held, so at one time the White Hart had been much patronised by lawyers. Inside the place one stepped straight into a story by Charles Dickens. There was a heavy, homely, slightly musty atmosphere, the bar was in the charge of a dragon who could have been Mrs. Squeers in person, and the dining-room, into which I peeped before ordering a drink, was dim, dark-wainscoted, and furnished with large mahogany tables and with chairs of the kind our great-grandfathers probably had in the dining-rooms of their gloomy Victorian homes. On the walls were heavily framed portraits of whiskered gentlemen in Dickensian collars and cravats, and over the mantelpiece, below which a coal fire was burning, hung a vast picture portraying a heavy-featured gentleman in the wig and robes of a judge.
I ordered a drink from the dragon. I would have liked a cocktail, but I met an eye which apparently dared me to ask for such a thing, so I ordered a dry sherry. It turned out to be about double the size served in other bars and no dearer.
“You’ll be staying for lunch, I suppose,” she said. Nervously I replied that I would like to have lunch. “Then make that drink last,” she said. “One o’clock’s the time we serve. You’d better see the head waiter. He’ll book you if there’s room. It’s market day. He’ll be in the garden. Put your drink down. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Which way is the garden?”
“Through there.” She pointed to an archway on my left. I abandoned the sherry to her guardianship, went through the archway, and traversed a vast, panelled room hung with pictures of hunting scenes and decorated with post-horns, whips, deers’ heads, stuffed pheasants, and a giant pike, the last two items in glass cases.
Passing through this mausoleum, I found another door, which opened on to a wooden balcony. From the balcony a long flight of wooden steps with a handrail led down into a long, narrow garden. This was given over mostly to fruit trees now denuded of their produce, but in a border on the right-hand side of a narrow path were some tatty, dreary-looking, bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, about the most uninspiring inflorescences I have ever seen, I think.
Near the end of the garden two elderly men were standing. The taller, whom I took to be one of the hotel guests, was wearing a smoking-jacket and black and grey plaid trousers; the other had on a winged collar and a black frock coat. The old gentleman in the smoking-jacket addressed me.
“Too late for the plums, I’m afraid,” he said.
“I didn’t come for plums,” I said. “I wanted to book a table for lunch.”
“Ah,” said the other old man, “certainly, sir. Come along while I look at my list. I can’t promise you a table to yourself. Our tables are for six or eight persons, and our lunches are popular, sir, very popular.”
“That’s all right. I’m a writer. I like company,” I told him. “One listens and learns.”
“We used to get the lawyers,” he said, preceding me along the narrow path, “but not now. They’ve moved the assizes to Bigsey. A pity, sir. Oh, dear! The stories those lawyers could tell! Quite hair-raising, some of them. Other times it was as much as I could do to keep a straight face as a young waiter. Very hilarious, sir, lawyers, and very improper at times. Worse than doctors, I’d say. Will you mount the steps first, sir? I shall be slower than you. The gentleman you saw me with is the owner of this hotel. He misses the lawyers sadly.”
As we walked through the long lounge with its trophies, he went on, “A writer, did you say, sir? We have a lady of your calling lunching here for the next fortnight. Dinner, too, so I have managed to squeeze in a little table for her, as our regulars are mostly gentlemen, but there would be room for two if she gave permission.”
He accepted a large book from the formidable barmaid, scanned the day’s entries, and asked me my name. He inscribed it and said, “One o’clock, sir, please, and your place reserved only until one-fifteen. We are popular, you see.” I picked up my sherry, which the barmaid had covered with a clean beermat, and turned to see a young woman standing behind me. “This is the lady writer. Mr. Stratford, miss. Miss Parkstone, sir,” said the waiter.
“Good Lord!” I said. “Imogen!”
“Good gracious me!” said the girl. “William, put Mr. Stratford at my table if he is staying for lunch.”
“What will you drink?” I asked.
“My usual, please, Mabel.”
“If you like to upset your liver, it’s no business of mine,” said the barmaid. “This gentleman had more sense.” She juggled with bottles and a shaker. We took our drinks into the lounge and seated ourselves in armchairs beneath a particularly fine set of antlers.
“So it was you,” I said. “How came you to be serving in a dress shop—viz., to wit, Trends?”
“To get material for a book, of course. I got the idea from P.G. Wodehouse. Do you remember Rosie M. Banks?”
“Oh, the female novelist who worked as a waitress in a gentlemen’s club to get material for Mervyn Keene, Clubman?”
“Exactly. Well, it struck me as such a good idea that I thought I would try it.”
“Monica Dickens tried it, and with signal success. This place rather brings Dickens to mind, don’t you think? Of course, Monica’s accounts of her experiences were autobiographical.”
“Don’t deviate. What’s all this about Trends? What were you doing among the ladies’ dresses? I didn’t know you were married.”
“I’m not.”
“Oho!”
“And not ‘Oho’ either. I am now an amateur detective. I was merely sleuthing at Trends. I was looking f
or traces of Gloria Mundy.”
“That woman whose body was found in the ashes of a bonfire? How on earth did you get mixed up in that awful business?”
“Never mind that for the moment. It’s a long story and it will keep. Let’s talk about you. I nearly dropped dead when the woman at the post-office at Culvert Green had a forwarding address for Parkstone. I thought coincidence was playing even more of a joke than usual.”
“I called myself Domremy at Trends, but I thought I had better come clean in the hotel register and at the post-office.”
“Just as well to avoid unnecessary complications.” I looked at her as the autumn sun brightened that otherwise depressing room and made gold lights in her fine-spun, dark-brown hair.
“Why aren’t you pale and interesting?” I demanded. “I was told that you had a whiter-than-white face, black hair, and cats’ eyes like green glass when you were at Trends.”
“They were thinking of somebody else. Anyway, Trends wasn’t the only stint I did in subservience to my art. I’ve worked in old-clothes shops in the East End, in men’s outfitters in the suburbs, in so-called salons in the provinces where they put one silk scarf and one Italian sweater in the window and sell trousers nobody would be seen dead in. I have even worked at an Irish draper’s where the bar behind the shop was a lot bigger than the shop itself and far better patronised. That was over in the Republic. Besides all that, I’ve worked in Kensington High Street, in Oxford Street, and (by virtue of knowing the management) in the clothing section of a Marks and Sparks. You name it, I’ve done it, so far as the sales side of the rag trade is concerned.”
“God bless my soul!”
“Keep on asking and perhaps He will.”
“It seems a lot of trouble to have gone to for a single book. That’s what I meant,” I said.
“Ah, but what a book it’s going to be! This is not a Rosie M. Banks, I’ll tell you. I’ve had a hell of a time, sometimes hilarious, sometimes very unpleasant—occasionally, when walking home alone after dark in some parts of London, even quite dangerous—but I’m sure it will be worth it. I plan a monumental opus after the style of Dostoievsky. I ended up at Trends, packed the job in—couldn’t stand the boss-lady for one thing—left my hotel, and came to stay in this town with my sister and write the book. If you’d paid your sub to the lit. soc. as a gentleman should, and kept in with the rest of the crowd, you would have known I’d moved out of London.”
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 14