“Just the English lady. Some of the neighbours stood outside, but she had not let them in, not even Madame Crovetti, who owns the houses. Indeed, she only permitted me inside enough to see the body, and then demanded that I stay back until l’inspecteur arrived. A most decisive lady, Madame ’Udson.” I thought that “Madame” here was less an indication of married status than it was the honorific for a lady too old to be addressed as Miss.
“You know her, then?”
“I know everyone in my area. She came in June. We have spoken from time to time.”
“What was she wearing that night?”
“Wearing? Her clothes, Monsieur. A dress. Blue perhaps, or green? Flowers along the…” His fingers sketched the line of his collarbone.
“Were there bloodstains on the dress?”
“No, Monsieur. Except—yes, along the bottom.”
“The hem?”
“There, yes. It had rubbed upon her, you know. Stockings.” He was embarrassed at having to refer to a woman’s legs.
“She was not wearing that dress when we saw her, just now.”
“No, Monsieur. We permitted her to take a valise.”
How civilised. And potentially foolish.
“What about the blood in the house?”
“Oof—there was a lot!”
“Splattered, or in a pool?”
The sideways look he gave Holmes was his first sign of puzzlement. His reply was slow in coming. “There was a pool of it, Monsieur. Around his chest where he lay.”
“What kind of floor? Carpet? Wood? Tile?”
“Boards. Well polished.”
“How dry were the edges of the pool?”
At that, our informant stopped dead, to look back and forth between us. “Monsieur, Madame: what is your interest in this matter?”
I spoke up first. “The lady is a friend. If it happens that the victim was shot long before she arrived home, and if it happens that we can determine that she was elsewhere, your inspecteur should know, before the true killer slips out of Monaco.”
“L’inspecteur is a good man.”
“We are not questioning that. And if the blood was very fresh, or if someone heard the gunshot after she returned home, we will stand away.” A lie, but this fellow wouldn’t know that. He also wouldn’t know that all this talk about pools of blood was making me distinctly queasy. It was not all that many weeks since I’d dragged a man from a pool of blood myself.
“What colour was it?” Holmes asked.
“The blood? It was red.”
“So dark red it seemed black, or turning to scarlet?”
“It was clearly red—though Monsieur, the light in the room, it was not bright.”
“I understand.”
“But half an hour later, when I helped to turn him over, the pool’s edges were going dry.”
Holmes stared at him, as if a dog had fetched back a treatise on spheroid objects instead of a ball. “Good man!” he said after a moment. “How dry?”
“Only the edges.”
“But visibly so? Noticeable from standing distance, that is, rather than kneeling on the floor?”
“Monsieur, I noticed it. Once the covers were taken from the lamps so we could see, that is. But then, I was in the War. I spent many hours watching blood dry.”
I was impressed. Not every copper would be so observant, or would understand why this lunatic series of questions mattered. Not all of us had co-authored a monograph on the drying times of blood under various conditions and on a variety of surfaces.
“Were photographs taken?”
“Some.”
“And your Inspector Jourdain: did he notice the edges as well?”
He gave that French noncommittal dip of the head. “L’inspecteur has excellent eyes, Monsieur.”
We could but hope.
By now we were standing before one of those clusters of dwellings that are found on the outskirts of any wealthy neighbourhood, a place where the better servants live. In Monaco, those would probably be croupiers, shop-keepers, and low-level bureaucrats, while the actual sons and daughters of toil rode the train in from France every morning. Even the wealthiest of towns had odd and uncomfortable corners where, until some enterprising soul decided to flatten their homes for a block of luxury flats, the middle working-class citizens would stay quietly, stubbornly on.
In other words, in no way hovels. The residents might spend their days at work rather than at play, but they were not the people who scrubbed toilets or gutted fish.
Our constabulary guide had stopped on the road before just such a backwater. It was up at the edges of La Condamine, a diminutive cul-de-sac among the sort of cliffs that had made Monaco both impregnable and largely unbuildable over the centuries. The lane was essentially a wide spot some fifty yards deep. The brief terrace of three conjoined buildings seemed to press against the cliff at the back. The first unit, nearest the actual road, looked like a warehouse converted to flats—two storeys tall, but its windows were all in the lower half, and a large, bricked-in rectangle surrounded the present small doorway.
The house at the far end was an actual house, with windows on both storeys.
Jammed in between the two was a smaller dwelling that had been scrubbed, painted, and tidied to within an inch of its life. Large earthenware pots on either side of its steps held bright flowers pinched into matching cascades of colour. The shutters were closed tight. The door had been fitted with a small brass viewing grille at Mrs Hudson’s height, over which a note was tacked: Entrée interdite. The card bore the insignia of the Monaco police.
“Mrs Hudson won’t be pleased with that hole in her fresh paint,” I said, in English.
“Assuming she comes home to see it,” my pessimistic husband pointed out, before continuing in French. “Is it permitted to enter?”
“Désolé, but l’inspecteur will need to approve that.”
“But of course. Is there any more that you can tell us about our lady friend?”
“Only that she always seemed friendly and of good cheer. I hope—Monsieur, Madame—that you are correct and that your friend is set free soon.”
We thanked him, shook his hand, and strolled off down the busy adjoining road…then two minutes later reversed our steps to the innermost dwelling, whose front-room curtains had twitched while we were on the lane outside.
We knocked. After a pause to establish that she had definitely not been watching us out of her window, the door came open.
She was a small, dark, bright-eyed woman of around fifty, with strong hands and a straight back. A shop-keeper, I thought—if not the shop’s owner. And one of the better establishments, to go by her neatness and pride.
“Madame…Crovetti?” Holmes began in French, with the air of a person who might at any moment bend down to kiss her hand.
“Yes?”
“We are friends of the lady who lives in the house next door. Your tenant, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“You are aware that the lady has been arrested?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you do not imagine that she could have done such a thing.” He managed to sound remarkably sincere.
She was not impressed. One shoulder came up, then dropped: a shrug.
Before Holmes could launch into a false protest of Mrs Hudson’s angelic person, I slid my own question in.
“The police haven’t let you in yet, have they? To clean.”
The flash of her dark eyes showed I’d hit the true problem. “The boards, they shall need to be sanded and finished afresh. Very expensive.”
“If Madame Hudson doesn’t pay for it, I will.”
Her expression turned thoughtful. After a bit, she gave a small nod. “As tenants go, she has been most respectable. Until this.”
“It was not
fair to you—or to her,” I said.
A definite softening.
“Did you know the young man who died?”
She raised her eyes to study the lane outside, then with a sigh drew open the door. “Come.”
It being well into the afternoon, Madame Crovetti gave us wine rather than coffee. After a brief hesitation, she brought over a bowl of almonds with an old silver nutcracker sticking out of the top, and we launched into an amiable if untidy conversation.
The reply to Holmes’ question was yes, she knew Niko Cassavetes. He’d been a friend of her son, and for nearly two years had been letting a room in the warehouse building at the end of her little terrace block. She was sad to hear of his death.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Very beautiful.”
“I agree—but as a person?”
Her expression was fond and the phrase she used would, I thought, translate into “plausible rogue”—a likeable sort, but with some shady associates.
“So,” Holmes suggested, his attention, to all appearances, on the almond he’d placed between the nutcracker’s jaws, “you may not have been completely surprised at the manner of his death.”
“The manner? Yes—and yet not entirely, no. But the place? I knew Madame ’Udson was using him for a few tasks, but so do we all. Niko has been the odd-job man hereabouts, for some time.” Her phrase was homme à tout faire—but not, it transpired, for jobs related to leaking pipes or uneven doors. “I thought it would be to do with driving, or an introduction to some of his friends in the artistic community. But that she would have to do with guns.” Her distaste was strong, as it had not been at the idea of minor criminality. Interesting.
“How did Madame Hudson come to hire rooms from you?”
“Niko learned that an English lady was searching for a house, and gave her my telephone number. I was happy enough to have her. It is too quiet here, without neighbours.”
“But didn’t you say that Niko lived here, down at the end?”
“Yes, and my son as well. But Matteo is away, for a time, and Niko is—Niko was—a young man with a busy life, often keeping him away at night. It is a comfort to have another person nearby, in the evenings.”
I could well believe that: the nearest street-lamp was on the main road, and walking down the cul-de-sac in the dark would be eerie. “Madame, do you know where Madame Hudson was yesterday afternoon?”
“I would think she was where she goes every Friday afternoon.”
“Where is that?”
She primly shook her head. “I know only that on Fridays, she is generally away. I do not know what time she goes or returns—I am at the shop until last thing at night. Perhaps you should ask her?”
“Alas, we have not been able to reach the inspector in charge of her release.” A true statement, if meaningless.
“There is little more I can say. Other than the lady does have friends—friends from before she came here.”
We both looked up from our smashed almonds. Seeing our interest, Madame went coy.
“I should not speak. She is a private woman, I think.”
“She is also an old woman, locked in a cold cell. While the blood hardens on your floor-boards and the killer of Niko Cassavetes walks free.”
To do her credit, the third point seemed nearly of equal weight to the second. She pursed her lips and took a turn with the nutcracker, dropping a perfect almond into a bowl. “The dress she wore, when she came to my door late at night to telephone the police.”
“The red one?”
“I have not seen her in a red dress,” she said—hardly surprising, since I had invented the garment as a mere prompt. “It was her eau de Nil frock, with a spray of embroidered violettes along the neck. She bought it from me, and it is a favourite to her, for functions of the afternoon.”
“As opposed to evening cocktail parties or dinners?”
“Ladies’ gatherings,” she specified.
It was hard to picture Mrs Hudson in an afternoon salon, chatting about hair styles and Paris fashion and…whatever it was groups of women gossiped about.
“Were these perhaps English ladies?”
“How would I know?” she said tartly, handing the nutcracker over to Holmes. “A dame would not invite the likes of me to her home.”
Something about the way she said the word caught my ear. Did she simply mean a grand lady?
Holmes had heard it, too. “By ‘dame,’ you mean…?”
“A lady of the bath.”
She’d lost me. An attendant at the thermal baths was an unlikely hostess for a ladies’ salon. The phrase sounded like one of those chivalric positions handed down from Tudor days—though were there female members of the Order of the Bath? I opened my mouth to ask for clarification, only to be distracted by the expression on Holmes’ face.
“A lady of the bath? Good Lord.” He seemed to be having a brainstorm, or heart attack, his features contorted by a paroxysm of…humour?
“Madame,” he said, “is it possible that you know where this Lady makes her residence?”
“Somewhere above Sainte-Dévote.”
He dropped the silver nutcracker and reached across the table to take our hostess’s hand. “Madame, we must be gone, I hope to see you very soon, in the company of Madame Hudson herself.”
With that, he was out the door.
I grabbed Madame Crovetti’s hand for a hasty shake.
“And you, Madame,” she began. “If you require any clothing suitable to your visit in Monaco, you could do no better than my shop in town. Just up from the Casino, on the Boulevard du Nord.”
The last was called at my back as I scrambled to follow Holmes. He’d been forced to wait for a motor to go past, so I did not quite need to break into a run.
“Holmes, what on earth was that about? Who is—are you laughing?”
He was—or at least, brimming over with amusement and surprise, as if Madame C. had given him a taste of past joys. “Madame de la Bathe,” he said, as if repeating the punch-line of a joke.
“Yes, I heard what she said. Who is Mrs Bath?”
“Not Mrs: Lady. Lady de Bathe.”
“Very well, but—wait. Lady de Bathe? Wasn’t that…?”
He all but rubbed his hands with pleasure. “Yes. None other than the Jersey Lily herself: Lillie Langtry.”
THREE WEEKS EARLIER
“Clarissa, what beautiful earrings!”
“I know.”
“You don’t sound very happy about that. Where did you get them?”
“A present from Zedzed.”
“Oh.”
“I made the mistake of admiring them in his hearing.”
“Well, they’re lovely—and they’ll look perfect with that Poiret dress.”
“Lillie, I couldn’t possibly wear them.”
“You couldn’t possibly not, considering where they came from.”
“I could tell him I’ve developed a skin sensitivity. Or that I’m saving them for some special occasion.”
“If Zedzed thinks you have rejected his gift, he will take it personally. He could make your life here very difficult.”
“I could say his wife wouldn’t approve?”
“Doña Maria would not object.”
“How could she have married the man? Do you think she hasn’t noticed how, I don’t know—empty he is? Sometimes, watching him when he’s looking elsewhere, I find myself wondering how many people he’s killed.”
“Clara, don’t!”
“Oh, Lillie, you’re right. Sorry. It’s just—I hate the notion of being forced to leave this place over a mere pair of earrings.”
“ ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’ Shakespeare has a bon mot for every situation, doesn’t he?”
“Isn’t it?”
“I made the same mistake one time, talking with Dr Watson, and Mr Holmes set me straight. It’s from Sir Walter Scott, one of those interminable poems of his—a poem about a woman named Clara, come to think of it. She loves a man, another man wants her, there’s a forged letter and a duel and a battlefield. Terribly rousing.”
“I do hope the villain of the piece isn’t named Basil.”
“No. Nor have I got bricked in behind the wall of a convent, which is what happens to her. Though if I disappear, that’s where you could start searching.”
“Clara, you must be seen wearing these.”
“I know. But…hmm. Perhaps I don’t have to keep them.”
“I certainly don’t think you should sell them.”
“I don’t mean that—I mean, what if they weren’t actually, strictly speaking, mine? Here, put that one back into the box, and let’s pretend there’s a ribbon around it. And so: ‘Lillie, my dearest friend, I missed your birthday this year. Would you please accept these by way of a belated gift? And I am sure my affection will overcome any unfortunate antecedents the earrings might once have had.’ ”
“Clarissa, you cannot simply give them to me.”
“I just did. So now I can say, ‘Oh, Lillie—what lovely earrings! They would go perfectly with that Poiret dress I bought in Paris. Might I possibly borrow them, for a few days?’ ”
“Would that make you feel better?”
“It would make me feel as though I shared a secret with my closest friend.”
“Then by all means, you may borrow ‘my’ earrings for as long as you like. As I borrowed your diamond necklace for all those years.”
“Thank you.”
“Tangled webs, indeed. Who would have imagined, all those years ago, that when you and I were this age, we’d be faced with a problem whose foundation we were then laying down?”
“Neither of us could have imagined being old. And back then, Zedzed was just another clever, handsome businessman who knew all the right people.”
“Back then, he was the same shiny brute, but we were too simple to know the difference.”
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