Riviera Gold

by Laurie R. King

  The smell that spilt out would have been alarming even if I didn’t know what it was. The dark stain, halfway between door and window, was an obscenity scrawled on polished floor-boards. Some of the droplets had been completely dry when the police arrived, though the careless boot-tracks leading down the hallway from the centre of the main pool showed that the deeper portions had only been half set.

  I picked my way cautiously through the dim room to the window and shutters, shoving both open as far as they would go. With the sunlight spilling in, I could see that the bullet had stopped Niko’s heart not instantly, but after a few seconds. Small droplets spattered the painted wall, and the colourful throw-rug near the desk was beyond salvage. However, the cleaning itself wouldn’t take me more than a few hours.

  But before I could start, there was another, even more unsavoury task: I had to search Mrs Hudson’s possessions.

  I did not imagine this would take long, either, since she’d only been here a few weeks, and—apart from whatever clothes she had bought in Paris—her possessions had fit into two valises. And indeed, her bedroom at the top of a narrow stairway held a fairly sparse collection. Mostly new clothing, a few pieces expensive enough for the Casino or dinner parties. The garments she’d brought from Sussex were dull in comparison, and resided at the back of the wardrobe. A pair of shoes that had been her good footwear had been downgraded to garden work, with traces of greyish mud around the soles. Looking from them to the trim pumps on the other side of the wardrobe, I couldn’t blame her for making a clean start of things.

  Drawers I pulled out, to feel the sides for hidden envelopes, and the photographs on her dressing table I slid out from their frames—though I was perfunctory in these gestures, since Mrs Hudson knew all the places an intruder would look at first. Then I went more deeply: tapping the wardrobe for hollow spaces; climbing up to inspect the toilet cistern; examining all the edges of the mattress for places where the stitching had been opened, then re-stitched. All the while I felt intrusive and ashamed, but I knew that if I did not do this search, Holmes would.

  I worked with great precision and scrupulous attention to detail, taking forever to get the bed re-made in exactly her manner.

  In the end, I came away with only two things of interest.

  The first was when I pulled open a drawer and was faced with an exaltation of silk and lace, in a rainbow of colours. It took a moment to translate the contents into clothing, and a longer moment before my mind accepted that if this was Mrs Hudson’s bedroom, then these were very probably hers.

  I’d seen Mrs Hudson’s sturdy undergarments on washing day, glimpsed when the wind revealed their discreet inner positions on the line, but those were garments best described as practical. Nothing like this frothy celebration of beauty. Chemises and camisoles, two short corsets and at least a dozen surprisingly non-voluminous knickers, an actual brassiere—in brilliant green…I stared, unwilling to lay a hand on such intimate things. I’d always thought of Mrs Hudson as womanly, but these were…feminine.

  Though why should I be shocked? Even old women liked pretty things. Why would they not secretly enjoy luxurious garments that were hidden from view?

  Assuming these were intended to remain hidden from view: Mrs Hudson was not much older than Holmes—just because she’d never had a gentleman friend while I knew her didn’t mean…

  I slammed the drawer shut, my mind as unable to follow that thought as my hands were unable to reach into the silk. But then, Mrs Hudson of all people would know not to hide anything of value in her underwear drawer. That was the first place even a rank amateur burglar would look.

  The other intriguing item I found was sitting openly on the back corner of her dressing table: a small jeweller’s box containing a pair of stunning gold earrings, with dark red garnets around ovals of intense purple amethyst. They were old, their edges burnished by wear, and the colours of the stones, a touch garish by day, would be magnificent under candlelight.

  I replaced the box precisely where I’d found it, then continued to the rest of the room. The search did not take long. No loose floor-boards, no hidden stashes of high-denomination banknotes, nothing to indicate that the woman living here was anything but a grey-haired lady with a colourful past and an unexpected taste in undergarments.

  No sins that I could see.

  The other room under the eaves contained her two valises and a larger suitcase so new the sides were unscuffed. I found nothing in the cases, nor in the rest of the storage room, so I went back down the narrow stairway and crossed the hallway to the final door, the one to the kitchen. And here at last I found Mrs Hudson—or at least, the Mrs Hudson I had known. The pans were twins of those she’d used daily, the plates were similar to her every-day ware, the arrangement of utensils and the scrubbed surfaces spoke of her presence.

  I searched this room even more closely than I had the bedroom, bending down to poke into every crevice, stretching to see atop every shelf, sifting through every stoppered container. I found nothing but painted wood, newly laid shelf-paper, and dried goods.

  I was relieved—both at finding no sins, and at the reassurance that some parts of her Sussex life had come with her.

  I located her store of rags and cleaning equipment—behind the scullery door, where she’d kept them in Sussex—and pulled them out, along with the less pristine of the two aprons and the pair of rubber gloves used for the truly dirty jobs. I filled the bucket with soapy water, and carried it and the rags to the sitting room.

  I had got as far as laying sodden rags over the black puddle when I heard the front door open. I scrambled up to cut her off.

  “Oh, Mrs Hudson! I’m so sorry, I’d hoped to have this finished by the time they let you—ah. Bonjour, Madame Crovetti.”

  The landlady, too, was dressed for a dirty job, carrying a bucket and mop of her own. The two of us set to work, with me tackling the really unpleasant portion while she concentrated on the lesser stains on the wall—in silence at first, until I asked her a harmless question about her shop and she seized with relief on the distraction of chatter.

  With care, that kind of conversation can reveal a great deal, and the good lady was so fixed on any topic other than what lay under her scrubbing rag that she did not notice how often the circuitous talk returned to touch on details of her tenant’s life.

  The previous afternoon, the landlady had said that Mrs Hudson came to her through Niko Cassavetes, who was a friend of her son, Matteo. A son who was “away for a time.” Where, and for what reason, were not forthcoming, although as we worked and chatted, I came to suspect that he was either serving time or evading arrest. Whatever the reason, it caused her embarrassment rather than fear or shame, and made her shift the talk sideways, rather than go silent altogether.

  “It’s nice that you stayed in touch with your son’s friend, Niko,” I commented. “I imagine boyhood friendships here last forever.”

  “No, Niko was not from here,” she said. “He came to Monaco perhaps three years ago.” That agreed with what Mrs Hudson had told us.

  “But you met him through your son?”

  “They came across each other somewhere, as boys do.”

  “From what they were saying in Antibes, Niko didn’t have a set job, but did work for all sorts of people? That must have made things difficult, during the off-season.”

  “Niko always seemed to find something. He was a nice boy, good manners, though to be honest, subject to minor temptations.”

  “The sort of man one would trust with one’s daughter but not with one’s change-purse?”

  She smiled sadly. “I had to tell him that if he was more than two months behind on his rent, he might come back to a changed lock.”

  I turned from my disgusting task of wringing out blood-stained rags. “How long had he been your tenant?”

  “Two years, next door.” She pointed her
chin towards the adjoining converted warehouse. “That is my son’s house. He asked if Niko could use the back rooms, which are dark and not very nice. But they fixed them up a little, and for a young man who spent most of his days out and around, they were comfortable enough. In truth, the past six months, I’ve been glad to have a man living nearby. I suppose I should let Niko’s rooms out. Though it will be awkward, until Matteo returns to approve.”

  I made some vague noise of sympathy and took the bucket of filthy water to throw out the back door—but oddly, I found the door not just locked, but permanently shut with a dozen large screws. Or rather, so it appeared. Closer examination showed that most of those screws had been sawn off and their heads reinserted, leaving only two holding the door in place.

  I could certainly understand—no cautious person would sleep comfortably in a house with no exit out the back. The permanent closure must have been done before Mrs Hudson moved in—and she, being a person both sensible and cautious, had preserved the look of the blockade without the actual thing. There was even a screwdriver perched atop the door jamb, for the remaining two fastenings.

  Well, if she didn’t want Madame Crovetti to know that she’d done this, I wouldn’t point it out. Instead, I lifted the bucket into the scullery sink, whose porcelain was old and chipped but, like anything of Mrs Hudson’s, clean enough to eat from. The sluice water tipped, dumped…and the revolting colour of blood and waste filled my world. A colour somewhere between brick and chocolate, dotted with cooling suds, swirling and draining and leaving behind a lot of small pieces…

  My gorge rose, and I added the contents of my stomach to the pitted sink. I slapped the faucet handle as wide open as it would go and tore the oppressive rubber from my hands, then set about rinsing and scrubbing and rinsing again. At some point I was aware of someone behind me, but she said nothing. A few minutes later, I heard the front door close.

  Eventually, I shut the water off. I used Mrs Hudson’s clean dish-towel to dry my face and glasses. Deliberately, I arranged the cloth on its rail, pulled the gloves back on, and wrung the clean, wet rags out into the sink again and again and again until they gave off nothing but clear water.

  I filled the bucket with fresh water, and returned to the task at hand.

  Had Mrs Hudson been sickened by her similar task, back in May? The stains she had feared were my blood, but had in fact been even worse…

  I wrenched my thoughts away from that memory and set about scouring every tiny trace of brown from the cracks between the boards. Countless buckets later, the harsh afternoon sun glaring across the room, the stain was gone. Madame Crovetti’s walls were damp but spotless. The blood-soaked carpet had vanished, and the air smelled of Jeyes Fluid, sunshine, and the lemon I had squeezed into the final bucket—a thing I had known Mrs Hudson to do.

  I sat back on my heels to pull off the gloves for a last time. During this final rinse, the landlady had returned, empty-handed. She stood in the doorway now.

  “How does it look?” I asked her.

  “The boards will show the effects of water. Once they are dry, I will have them polished.”

  I nodded. While she set about closing all the windows and shutters, I polished clean the bucket and sink, gathering the scrub-brush and rags for the dust-bin. When everything was as near to perfect as I could make it, the two of us stood to look at the purified room, shoulder to shoulder in a job adequately done.

  “The portion of your son’s house that Monsieur Cassavetes was letting,” I said. “Would it be available? For a short time, while your son is away?”

  “For you?” The note of near-scandal in her voice warned me that the rooms were unsuitable for a young woman, even one with hands resembling untanned leather, who had spent the day scrubbing a floor on her knees.

  “For an acquaintance. He is doing some work here and was thinking of taking rooms rather than having to ride the train in every day from Nice.”

  I could see her weighing the potential income against the idea that letting the rooms without her son’s approval was an admission that he was not returning soon. “Perhaps,” she said. “If your friend is respectable.”

  “Oh, terribly. Perhaps I might look at them?”

  “Now?”

  “If you have time. I shall be seeing him tonight.”

  She reached for her heavy ring of keys, and locked one door before walking along the narrow pavement to open the next.

  My brother died when he was young, so I have never lived with an adolescent boy or a male undergraduate, but I instinctively recognised the signs. Mismatched furniture, inadequate lighting, sparse kitchenware, and despite Madame Crovetti’s efforts, the musty odour of unwashed clothing.

  The surfaces were tidy and all the corners clean, but short of hauling the furniture out for the rag-and-bone man, there was not much she could do about the smell of dirty socks.

  She muttered something about “boys” as she led me rapidly through the rooms, but I pretended not to hear, or to notice the pinkness of her neck. The place was something of a maze, its conversion from storage to living quarters having been less planned than piecemeal. At the back of it stood a solid door set into a wall that was little more than wallpaper over rough boards, the paper puckered over every crack and seam—although the door itself had been varnished recently, its hinges and knob polished. The lock yielded to one of her keys. She let me step in first.

  The quarters of the Greek boy did not smell of old socks. They smelled of spices and lemons. The furniture was inexpensive but chosen with care. There was a Turkish carpet on the floor, small but of high quality, and a pair of thick, colourful tapestries—bed covers, really, but nice ones—covering the wall behind the settee, edge to edge and ceiling to floor. The rooms had no kitchen, but a kettle stood on a single gas ring, and two shelves above a small deal table held various pans, cooking implements, and jars with everything from rice to pickled lemons to dried oregano. Basic, but a vast improvement on what lay in the actual kitchen next door.

  The bedroom was an oddly shaped space that I realised must be jammed in beneath the cliff-face. Its back wall was angled, not as sharply as a dormer roof but enough that the eyes did not try to see it as straight. A row of hooks acted as Niko’s wardrobe, holding everything from a warm dressing gown to an evening suit in a garment bag. The shoes tucked into the angled space behind the garments ran a similar gamut, from gleaming patent leather to worn but polished brogues to a pair of colourful satin bedroom slippers. At the end, looking oddly English, stood a pair of rubber Wellingtons, new but for a tidal mark of dried grey soil around the foot. These, unlike the other footwear, rested on a sheet of newspaper.

  I spotted something on the back wall of the impromptu wardrobe, but I did not want her to see my nosiness. Instead, I coughed, then stepped away from the wall and eyed the room as if measuring it for my fictitious, would-be tenant. “Does Niko have any family?”

  “I know of none, but my son may. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering what one does with things left behind by a tenant. I suppose you have to wait for the police to tell you?”

  I’d heard of landladies swooping down to sell a tenant’s possessions before they were in the ground, but to Madame Crovetti’s credit, the thought of profit had clearly not occurred to her.

  Until I introduced it. She admitted she did not know.

  “Well, don’t hurry to clear Niko’s things, once the police give you permission,” I told her. “My friend might be interested in the fittings as well.” I coughed again, patted my chest, and said, “I seem to have picked up an irritation. Would you be so kind as to bring me a drink of water? Or, I could get it, if you don’t mind?” I gave another cough.

  Had her son’s part of the house been up to this room’s standards, she might have made me get my own glass of water, but at the thought of me in the kitchen…

  �
�Just a moment,” she said, and went to find a glass that would not offend. By the time she returned, I was back in the sitting area, smoothing my rumpled hair. I thanked her profusely, drank the water down, and handed her back the glass.

  “That’s much better, thank you. Can I let you know tomorrow, about whether my friend would be interested? Or possibly the next day?”

  I followed her through Matteo’s rooms to the street, where I thanked her again, made note of her telephone number, then walked down to the road while she returned to her own house at the cul-de-sac’s end.

  Once out of her sight, I turned to study the warehouse-turned-living quarters. The cliff-face was indeed pressed up against the back of it, but the two neighbouring houses appeared to stand free of the rock itself. And Mrs Hudson’s scullery door, the one someone had fastened shut, must lead somewhere.

  I turned away with that lightness of heart that came with discovering a fact before Holmes found it, and made my way through the town to the Monte Carlo district, and the Hôtel Hermitage.

  Presenting my damp and grubby person to the desk, again I requested their assistance in the matter of appropriate dress. Again the French maid appeared, followed by several reasonable approximations of my requested “dark trousers and simple shirt, suitable for gardening” and “women’s simple short-sleeved frock.” I gave her another generous tip.

  Feeling doubly virtuous, as a cleaner of floors and a purchaser of clothing, I rewarded myself with a hot bath, a cup of tepid liquid resembling tea, and—as there was no sign of Holmes—a nap.

  * * *

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