The Crimson Rooms (55 page)

“I took your advice,” I said. “I never did tell anyone I could type. So now I am training to be a lawyer.”

He put his fingertips together and smiled. I was touched that he seemed after all to have remembered the details of our few conversations. “I have a great favor to ask you. But I also have to be sure that you will treat our discussion in absolute confidence.”

He raised an eyebrow. I remembered why I had found him so attractive; the stillness, the air of knowing so much more than he would ever say.

“You ask a great deal.”

“A man is on trial for murder. There is a detail missing, a witness who I believe is concealing something, maybe to do with the war, that might shed some light . . .” Could he tell that my lips were trembling?

“Who is the man in question?”

“A businessman and would-be politician, Sir David Hardynge.” He nodded as if to say, I know of him. “I want to know about his connections. I want to know if there was anything at all untoward on his record.”

He sat for a moment, considering me. I wondered if he remembered the red bowl, the unyielding silence when he had removed it from my hands, the hopelessness with which I received his touch. “I’ll see what I can do. It will take a while. Perhaps you could come back sometime next week.”

“I don’t have any time. The case is being heard at the moment. In fact it may already be too late.”

The fingertips tapped together. Then he sighed, told me that he would order someone to bring tea and that he would show me to a room where I could wait.

I was ushered to a lobby, where I sat in a red plush chair with gilt arms like a throne. A young clerk went by, wheeling a trolley stacked with files. After ten minutes, a woman wearing a shapeless gray skirt and with untidy hair escaping from its pins (like yours, Evelyn, I thought drearily) brought me tea in a plain white cup and saucer. A clock somewhere struck nine-thirty, then ten, and I wondered what Breen would say when I didn’t turn up at the trial. My life was in the balance, or so it seemed to me. I didn’t know what I dreaded most, a report that revealed nothing or a report that somehow gave substance to my gnawing fears.

At about twenty to eleven, another woman appeared, this one very neat in a pale blue dress with a narrow belt, and with well-cut hair. She offered to escort me back to his office.

His desk now had one file upon it.

“I cannot of course let you read the file but I can summarize the documents within it, if you like, and see if any is of interest to you. Hardynge’s activities extended far and wide during the war. He served on various committees to do with funding the military. And he seems to have had a benevolent streak, setting up a significantly well-endowed fund for refugees and the wives of prisoners of war. He was trustee of an organization that gives relief to families in which the main breadwinner remains incapacitated by war.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. More or less. There is one thing.” And he removed from the file a letter, typed on thin, yellowing paper. “Hardynge seems to have some very prestigious friends. A brief correspondence with General Haig has found its way into the file. In his letter, Hardynge pleads for clemency on behalf of a young officer who, together with his companion, a nineteen-year-old private, was court-martialed for desertion and for firing at the military policeman who attempted to arrest them, both capital offenses as you doubtless know. Hardynge’s petition was successful; the officer was sent home and confined to an institution dealing with shell-shocked patients. The other boy was executed. The court-martial accepted the officer’s word that it was the young private who had fired the gun.”

“What was the name of that boy?” I whispered.

“Fox. Private Fox. The officer in question, by the way, was Captain Donald Hardynge.”

I went back to St. James’s Park,
where I strode about, sat on a bench, got up. It was midday. What was happening in Aylesbury? Perhaps the closing speeches had already begun. The park was full of people with time on their hands, nannies and toddlers, the wheelchair bound, the limpers, the men in broken boots who sat with their hands hanging between their knees or scouring the columns of a discarded newspaper, ladies in flirty summer dresses, a listless girl making a halfpenny bun last a lunchtime. One of Meredith’s favorite songs replayed in my mind: “You must go your way, and I must go mine, But now that our love dreams have ended, What’ll I do, when you are far away, And I am blue . . .”

I walked along the other side of the lake, too restless to stay anywhere long. Mostly I kept to paths; sometimes, where permitted, I crossed the new-mown lawns. Stella Wheeler. Mud and grass on her shoes. A pathetic collection of acorn cups and conker cases. Scrapings from the park. I remembered Hardynge’s eyes half concealed behind his glasses when asked about Stella’s missing night. Blink. Blink. He must surely have been with her, but where? Her clothes had been stained with mud and grass and smelled bad. What had she been up to? Was that the night he’d presented her with the bronze statue? Or—as seemed more likely now—was the statue a reward or recompense for something that happened that night? He was drawn to women in uniforms, said Meredith, and that little waitress, the thwarted dancer Stella Wheeler, would have been easy pickings for a rich gentleman liberal with promises.

Stella had worked in Lyons in Regents Street, so where was the nearest place where a man and woman, intent on a secret meeting, might lose themselves? Green Park.
Hyde Park
. Hyde Park, notorious haunt of those after a quick fumble, a clandestine rendezvous. The newly appointed women police officers were constantly making a nuisance of themselves by plucking from the bushes couples up to no good.

Breen had ordered a search of the police records for the middle of April and uncovered nothing. No matter, I would look again. I was now walking fast and purposefully up Constitution Hill. There were various police stations in or on the fringes of London parks, the most notorious, Hyde Park, on the slope above the Serpentine, among trees. The last time I’d confronted that innocuous red-brick frontage, I was tagging along after Breen to bail out one of his habitual female clients accused of using foul language to a woman police officer while resisting arrest. Breen treated police stations as if they were his club; genial wave to passing officers, a thumbs-up to the administrative staff, who fell all over themselves to supply him with tea and biscuits.

Wolfe had said, when fingering the cloakroom ticket found in Stella’s sponge bag, that he’d seen its type before as his clients redeemed their belongings on release from a police station. We had considered the possibility of Stella spending the night in a police cell—certainly that would explain the smell on her clothes—but found no evidence. Now, though, I knew what I was looking for. I had seen Hardynge, under oath, deny that he had been with her one night in April, but Hardynge was like a boulder buried in sand: the more we cleared away, the more I discovered was obscured from view. And I was driven by the kind of momentum that comes in times of extreme tension, as in the examination hall. I did not consider that I was tired and hungry or that I would face the usual opposition from the male establishment as I pushed through the swing doors and entered the fug of the outer office.

There was, as in every police station I had ever visited, a motley collection of customers awaiting attention. A woman at the head of a languid queue was describing a lost cat to an officer filling out a form. Breen would have marched straight up to the desk, but I bided my time as first the cat woman was dealt with, then a man with a crushed cap who wanted to visit his son who’d been
banged up
for assault, then a gentleman who wished to report a stolen bicycle.

When it was my turn, the interview that followed was predictable. “I am from Breen and Balcombe, solicitors. I wish to consult your records of arrest in April.”

The officer was tall, with childish round eyes. “You are from where?”

I produced letters addressed to me at Breen & Balcombe, but he wasn’t satisfied. “We don’t show our custody records to the public. They’re confidential.”

“I believe Mr. Breen has already had the records checked. Whoever looked before might have missed something. New evidence has come to light since then.”

“Mr. Breen should come back here hisself.”

“Mr. Breen is in court in Aylesbury.” My control was wafer-thin. “If you want you could ring our office and his secretary will vouch for me.”

The officer was torn. He knew Breen, of course, and probably feared his wrath. In the end, he pulled the telephone toward him, asked the operator for the number of Breen & Balcombe (he didn’t trust me to give the correct one), and dialed. I prayed to God I no longer believed in that Miss Drake would answer the phone promptly and then cooperate. The policeman’s gaze raked up and down my face as he introduced himself to the invisible presence on the end of the line: “It is a matter of verification, madam. Could you confirm for me that a Miss Evelyn Gifford works for your firm of solicitors?”

Long pause before I heard Miss Drake’s voice scrape across the wires.

“In what capacity?”

A longer pause before the voice began again. I heard the words
junior
and
clerk
. Then the sergeant passed the receiver to me. “She wants to speak to you.”

“Miss Gifford,” said Miss Drake in her heavily enunciated telephone voice. “Mr. Breen had telephoned me twice this morning to ask whether I know your whereabouts. What am I to inform him if he calls again?”

“That I was delayed.”

Pause. “Miss Gifford, do you intend to go to Aylesbury today?”

“I cannot.”

A long silence. Then she said something very surprising indeed. “Take care, Miss Gifford.”

I was led at last through the back office, down the stairs to the cells, and surrendered up to the custody sergeant, a cozy man so glad of the diversion that he even offered me tea. Someone, possibly the assault case, was hammering rhythmically on a cell door.

“Could I ask about your procedures,” I said as he loaded a tin tray with cups and (rather touchingly) a china milk jug patterned with bluebells. “Should a prisoner have valuables of any kind which you wish to confiscate for safekeeping while they are under arrest, what is the process?”

“We writes them down in a book and we issues a ticket. When they leave they show the ticket and we returns their things. Unless of course we want to use something in evidence. We enter the number into the log.”

“Could I see the type of tickets you issue?” But I knew already that he would produce a book of mushroom-colored cloakroom tickets.

So I sat in that stuffy little chamber, corridors of cells to the right and left, and the custody sergeant shuffling about with kettle and teapot, and opened the ledger at April 1, 1924. It seemed to me that I must read each entry, one at a time, skipping nothing, or the spell would be broken.

On Tuesday, April 15, I found what I was looking for, inscribed in painstaking copperplate, each column across two double pages filled in. The date. Time:
11:04 in the evening
. Name of the arresting officer. Name of the arrested party:
Julie Fox
. Date of Birth:
March 23, 1902
. Address:
4 Lyons Street, Acton
. Occupation:
Servant
. Charge:
Behavior reasonably likely to offend against public decency.
Legal representative:
None
. Outcome:
Caution
. Released:
9 a.m. morning of Wednesday, April 16.
Chit
437
.

And beneath, another entry.
Miss Fox arrested in association with
:
Name not supplied
. Legal representative: a scrawled signature.
Released without charge
.

I managed to speak, though my index finger would not hold still as I pointed to the entry. “Do you remember that night?”

The sergeant smiled kindly. “I don’t, miss. The officer in question has since moved on. I only been here since the beginning of May.”

“Isn’t it unusual for a name not to be entered in the book?”

He pulled it toward him. “Very. But some hold out until they’ve tooken legal advice. Looks like this all came to nothing anyway.”

I nodded, trembling so hard I couldn’t hold my cup steady. The sergeant was talking about his previous posting in Stepney, which he preferred. You get used to the regulars. Here you never know what’ll come in next. I nodded again and trembled, and then at last escaped into the daylight.

The name Julie Fox would have meant nothing to a policeman requested by Breen to scan the records for Stella Hobhouse, and the signature of the legal representative was such a scrawl as to be almost indecipherable. But I knew it. Oh, I did. Had I not, in the past couple of weeks, read three letters over and over again, each signed
Nicholas Thorne
?