Two for Sorrow (53 page)

The lights dimmed again after the interval, and an audience which had responded to the entertainment so far with polite applause stood and cheered as the curtain rose on the stars of the night. Noël and Gertie, dressed as music-hall performers, stood in front of a painted street scene which could have been the backdrop to any provincial theatre in England; both wore curly red wigs and sailor clothes with exaggerated bell-bottomed trousers, and each carried a telescope. They launched into their first number, and Archie raised his glass to an older man on a nearby table, who smiled suspiciously as he returned the greeting. ‘Who's that?' Josephine asked.

‘The chief constable.'

‘Why's he looking at you like that?'

‘Because he thinks I'm about to disgrace him with the Home Office.'

She stared at him. ‘And are you?'

‘I hope not.'

They turned back to the stage, where Gertrude Lawrence was taking particular delight in mocking the seedy touring
life which she had known earlier in her own career; Coward's music, and the banter which ran in between the songs, perfectly captured the half-desperate atmosphere of a struggling music hall, an atmosphere that Josephine remembered herself from her early introductions to theatre. The piece was a light-hearted affair, both loving and cynical, but even the ridiculously exaggerated outfits couldn't hide the magic of the partnership on stage; it was a radiant, if fragile, glamour which had sustained people since the war and which continued to keep them spellbound now, even as most of them feared that their lives were once again held to ransom by politics, and Josephine doubted that there was a single person in the room who wasn't thankful for it.

As the orchestra picked up the refrain and the on-stage husband and wife lapsed into a series of terrible jokes, Josephine noticed Mary Size leave the room, followed swiftly by Fallowfield. She watched him go, surprised that he was willing to miss a second of the performance; he glanced quickly at Archie as he passed, but she thought nothing of it. His departure left an empty seat by the Snipe, who seemed to be finding the performance a vast improvement on
Romeo and Juliet
; the Motleys' housekeeper smiled when she caught Josephine's eye, and Josephine hoped to God that she could rely on her to be discreet about the bed which sat redundant in Maiden Lane. She didn't want to have secrets from Archie, but she wasn't ready to face her own feelings for Marta yet, let alone discuss them with anyone else.

The fading music-hall couple attempted a snappy finale, but Lawrence's character dropped her telescope and ruined the whole effect. As her husband glared at her, the curtain fell, then rose again almost immediately on a squalid dressing
room. Noël and Gertie reappeared, still breathless from the number and looking furiously at each other; they flung their wigs down and ripped off the sailor clothes, and the sight of Gertrude Lawrence clad only in brassiere and silk knickers drew the loudest cheer of the night. ‘I bet you're not saying “Gertrude who?” now,' Josephine whispered to Archie, but he was still miles away. He nodded at someone, and she followed his gaze to the door and to Lillian Wyles; as she watched, Wyles walked over to the committee table and whispered something in Celia Bannerman's ear, then handed her a note and left the room. ‘What's going on, Archie?' Josephine asked, suddenly afraid. ‘First Mary Size and now Celia.' As if on cue, Bannerman got up and hurried from the hall. ‘You surely can't think …'

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘Just stay here. I'll explain later.' Without another word, he got up and went after the two women.

From the doorway to Memorial Hall, Fallowfield watched Mary Size walk across the college foyer to the stairs, then followed her at a discreet distance up to the first floor. She hesitated at the mezzanine level, and he held back, waiting for her to make a move; for a moment, he thought she was simply looking for the ladies' cloakroom and he breathed a sigh of relief, but then she turned and hurried up the stairs. He quickened his pace, hoping that the muffled cheers and applause from the hall below would mask the sound of his footsteps, and followed her over the next landing and up to the treatment rooms on the second floor. There was only one place she could be headed for now, and he could think of no legitimate reason why she should have left the performance to see Lucy Peters. But a prison governor? Could they really have got it so wrong?

He arrived at the door to Lucy's room just in time to hear her remonstrating with Miriam Sharpe. ‘Oh come on, Miriam—just let me see her for a moment. I won't stay long and surely it won't do her any harm? From what I hear, it can't get much worse for the poor girl.'

The nurse looked questioningly at Fallowfield, and he nodded. ‘You're right, Mary,' she said gravely. ‘I'm afraid it really can't get any worse at all. Lucy died earlier this evening.'

Fallowfield watched Mary Size's face as she took in the news, but there was no hint of relief, only a deep sorrow which she made no effort to hide. He introduced himself, and then asked gently: ‘Can I ask why you wanted to see Miss Peters, Ma'am?'

She took a moment to register the question, then held out a photograph. ‘Yes of course, sergeant—I came to leave this by her bedside. I wanted it to be the first thing she saw when she came round.' He took the picture and looked down at a beautiful baby girl, less than a year old. ‘I'm afraid I've broken all the rules and accepted procedures to get hold of it. You should never contact the new parents once an adoption has gone ahead, but I don't regret it. The one thing Lucy wanted was to know that her baby was all right. I thought if she had that peace of mind, she might have the strength to pull through this terrible thing that's happened to her, but it seems that I've come too late.' She unpinned the silk violets from the front of her dress and handed them to Miriam Sharpe with the photograph. ‘I hope she may have found some peace of a different sort now, but will you give her these anyway?'

Fallowfield was about to offer what words of consolation he could find, but, before he had the chance, a scream came from the floor below.

By the time Penrose left the hall, there was no sign of Celia Bannerman, but he knew exactly where to go: he had instructed Wyles to lead her to the first-floor drawing room, where two other officers were already concealed, and he hurried up the stairs and along the corridor, past the glass dome over the dining room and into the Cowdray Club part of the building. The door was ajar, but there was no sound of voices from inside. Impatiently, he waited a few seconds, then cautiously pushed the door open. As he had feared, the room was empty.

‘Where is she?' he shouted, panic driving him quickly to anger.

Swann and Christofi emerged from their respective hiding places, looking bewildered. ‘She hasn't come anywhere near here, sir,' Christofi said. ‘When did she leave the gala?'

‘A few minutes ago,' Penrose snapped as he headed back to the door. ‘Come on. If she's on her own with that bitch, God knows what might be happening.'

The scream from further down the corridor offered more possibilities than any of them wanted to hear.

Wyles had not expected Bannerman to follow her so quickly from the hall; before she had a chance to climb the stairs, she heard a voice behind her, calling her back.

‘Not the drawing room,' Bannerman said calmly, her voice showing no trace of anger or fear. ‘Someone may come in. If you want to talk to me, we'll go to my office.'

Wyles hesitated, knowing that to obey would be to go against everything that she had been taught in her fifteen years of policing; by the same token, a chance like this was what she had been waiting for all that time. She weighed Penrose's anger
against his approval, and the latter won. After all, the woman in front of her was in her fifties or sixties; if she was no match for that, she shouldn't be in the police force at all. Hesitantly, she nodded at Bannerman, and followed her up to her room.

Once inside, Bannerman locked the door and removed the key. Without a word, she walked over to the other side of the room, took a piece of paper out of her evening bag and placed it with Lillian's note on the desk between them. ‘Your letter implied that you know what happened to the last person who sent me a threatening message,' she said. ‘If that's the case, I'm surprised you would wish to risk following in her footsteps.'

This veiled affirmation of everything that Penrose had suspected sent a shiver of triumph and fear through Wyles. She looked defiantly at Bannerman, determined to force her into a more direct confession. ‘I'm smarter than Marjorie,' she began cautiously, ‘and I'm not greedy. Anyway, you can't go on like this forever, can you? Sooner or later, it's got to stop, and it might as well stop with me. I can keep my mouth shut for a fair price, without the help of a needle.'

It was a gamble, but it seemed to give Bannerman the proof she was looking for. She nodded, and unlocked the top drawer of her desk. ‘I see. And what would you call a fair price?'

‘Two hundred should do it.' Wyles looked over at the pile of notes that Bannerman had removed from the drawer. ‘Or as near as damn it. Like I said, I'm not greedy.'

‘And how do I know that if I give you your money today, you're not going to come back tomorrow for more?' Bannerman walked towards her, the money in her hand.

‘Because you can trust me. Why would I push you when I know what you're capable of?'

‘A good answer, but not quite the right one.' She held out the
notes, and only spoke again when Wyles had committed herself to taking them. ‘You see, I'll know you're not coming back because you simply won't be able to.' Even as her fingers closed around the money, Wyles was conscious of Bannerman's other arm moving rapidly upwards, drawing a line across her chest; she saw the glint of a knife before she felt the pain, and looked down to see blood already seeping through her dress. The cut was mercifully shallow, but the shock of the attack and the sudden realisation of the danger she was in were enough to make her feel faint, and she struggled not to lose consciousness. Bannerman came at her again with the knife. It was a surgical instrument, Wyles noticed, small but deadly, and it struck her as ironic that something which had been created to save lives should so easily be put to the opposite purpose. Using her strength while she still had some to use, she grabbed hold of Bannerman's wrist and smashed her arm down on the desk. The woman yelled in pain and let go of the knife, and Wyles used her temporary advantage to kick it across the room. The respite was only brief: Bannerman's anger fuelled her strength, and Wyles was astonished and horrified by the ease with which the older woman pushed her to the floor. She tried to resist, but the brief amnesty on pain which follows any wound was well and truly over now, and Wyles felt increasingly weakened by the loss of blood. Sensing victory, Bannerman pinned her to the floor and put her knee on Wyles's chest, twisting it hard against her skin and aggravating the injury until she screamed to be released from the torture; she thought she saw her attacker smile as she took the scarf from her own neck and wound it round Wyles's throat.

Then there were shouts in the corridor outside. For the briefest of seconds, Wyles was overcome with relief—until she
realised that the prospect of help was just the impetus Bannerman needed to finish what she had started. As desperate shoulders pushed against the heavy oak door, she felt the scarf tighten around her neck and knew that the struggle was all but over. Seconds later, she heard Penrose's voice calling her name and felt him dragging Celia Bannerman away from her, but she lost consciousness before she was able to thank him.

‘Loving you is hard for me—it makes me a stranger in my own house. Familiar things, ordinary things that I've known for years like the dining-room curtains, and the wooden tub with a silver top that holds biscuits and a watercolour of San Remo that my mother painted, look odd to me, as though they belonged to someone else—when I've just left you, when I go home, I'm more lonely than I've ever been before.'

Josephine had tried not to look over to Marta's table too often, but the music-hall sketch had given way to an exquisitely written piece set in a railway station cafe, and, as Gertrude Lawrence's character continued with an understated but affecting monologue which seemed so accurately to express the situation they found themselves in, she was compelled to look to Marta for some solidarity, if only to reassure herself that she wasn't suffering alone. Lydia chose that moment to stand up and walk to the bar; as she passed behind Marta, she let a hand rest on her shoulder and Marta squeezed it affectionately. It was an unconscious gesture, not designed to be provocative in any way, but its very ordinariness was the last thing that Josephine wanted to see: it spoke of a bond that didn't need to be continually questioning itself, a life too busy being lived to find its way into the pages of a diary, and it was
so different from the connection which she and Marta shared that she could stand it no longer. She stood to get some air, wondering if Noël and Gertie had ever had to put up with so much disruption during a performance. The mood at supper afterwards was likely to be deadly.

The door to Henrietta Place stood open and she watched the comings and goings in the street for a while, too glad of the anonymity to worry much about the cold. Putting Marta from her mind, she wondered where Archie was; she had long given up trying to work out what was going on—the conclusions she came to were simply too bizarre to contemplate—but she was worried about him, in spite of his reassurances that everything was fine. As if in response to her concern, the noise of an ambulance cut sharply across the murmur of night-time traffic in Oxford Street; to her horror, it rounded the corner a moment later and pulled up by the kerb, followed shortly by two police cars, and she moved back into the foyer to allow the men through unhindered.