Murder At Plums Read online

  Murder at Plum’s

  Amy Myers

  The third Auguste Didier crime novel

  Copyright © 1989 Amy Myers

  The right of Amy Myers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical characters – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 1385 3

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

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  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also By

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Floor Plan

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Amy Myers was born in Kent. After taking a degree in English Literature, she was director of a London publishing company and is now a writer and a freelance editor. She is married to an American and they live in a Kentish village on the North Downs. As well as writing the hugely popular Auguste Didier crime series, Amy Myers has also written five Kentish sagas, under the name Harriet Hudson, that are also available in ebook from Headline.

  Praise for Amy Myers’ previous Victorian crime novels featuring Auguste Didier, also available in ebook from Headline: ‘Wittily written and intricately plotted with some fine characterisation. Perfection’ Best

  ‘Reading like a cross between Hercule Poirot and Mrs Beeton . . . this feast of entertainment is packed with splendid late-Victorian detail’ Evening Standard

  ‘What a marvellous tale of Victorian mores and murders this is – an entertaining whodunnit that whets the appetite of mystery lovers and foodies alike’ Kent Today

  ‘Delightfully written, light, amusing and witty. I look forward to Auguste Didier’s next banquet of delights’ Eastern Daily Press

  ‘Plenty of fun, along with murder and mystery . . . as brilliantly coloured as a picture postcard’ Dartmouth Chronicle

  ‘Classically murderous’ Woman’s Own

  ‘An amusing Victorian whodunnit’ Netta Martin, Annabel

  ‘Impossible to put down’ Kent Messenger

  ‘An intriguing Victorian whodunnit’ Daily Examiner

  Also by Amy Myers and available in ebook from Headline

  Victorian crime series featuring Auguste Didier

  1. Murder in Pug’s Parlour

  2. Murder in the Limelight

  3. Murder at Plum’s

  4. Murder at the Masque

  5. Murder makes an Entrée

  6. Murder under the Kissing Bough 7. Murder in the Smokehouse

  8. Murder at the Music Hall

  9. Murder in the Motor Stable And Kentish sagas written under the name Harriet Hudson also available in ebook from Headline

  Look for Me by Moonlight

  When Nightingales Sang

  The Sun in Glory

  The Wooing of Katie May

  The Girl from Gadsby’s

  For the first time in its history, Plum’s, that palace of respectability where English gentlemen can find refuge from the world, has agreed to admit ladies. Nothing has been right since.

  A series of bizarre incidents plague the club. A rat appears on the dining table, newspapers are mutilated, obscene letters are sent to the doorman, and a member’s portrait is slashed. ‘Pranks,’ say the members. Then a slightly less than lethal dose of poison in the brandy cream dessert turns master chef Auguste Didier into the Master Detective again. And just in time.

  Then the impossible happens – a murder at Plum’s! One of the members is found dead – and Auguste and his friend Inspector Egbert Rose of Scotland Yard are on a not-so-discreet hunt for a demonically clever and ruthless killer. A gentleman perhaps.

  For Peter and Audrey

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks are due as always to my agent Dorothy Lumley of the Dorian Literary Agency and my editor Jane Morpeth, both of whom have guided me gracefully and efficiently along the path to publication. I am also grateful to my friends Adrian Stewart and Malcolm Jones and Wing Commander W Fry, MC, who answered my questions enthusiastically and helpfully, and to Adrian Stewart for pointing me also in the direction of Donald R Morris’s excellent The Washing of the Spears for information on the Zulu Campaign. My thanks go also to my friend the artist Natalie Greenwood who so skilfully assisted Inspector Egbert Rose to sketch the plans of Plum’s Club for Gentlemen and Mr Gaylord Erskine’s residence. I should also point out that neither Plum’s nor its architecture exists in St James’s Square.

  Prologue

  ‘Gentlemen, I fear, I greatly fear, that a dark shadow menaces our future. Indeed threatens our very existence.’

  He spoke quietly, his drawn Pickwickian features bearing sufficient witness to the seriousness of the situation. For six hours now the nine men had been sitting round the oval table in the elegantly proportioned chandeliered room overlooking St James’s Square. From ten o’clock that morning, they had been locked in earnest, at times almost violent, discussion.

  Its gravity was underlined by the all-but-untouched plates of German and anchovy toasts, and carafes of claret, hastily organised in the kitchens and brought up by the chef, Monsieur Auguste Didier himself, curious to know the cause of such an unusual summons. Never before in the history of Plum’s had luncheon been held in such disregard. Auguste’s sharp eyes had flicked round the nine men who barely acknowledged the arrival of sustenance, let alone his own. Bankruptcy? A death? Those unfortunate happenings? Certainly, no mere blackballing this.

  ‘Ah, thank you, Didier,’ Oliver Nollins’ normally cherubic face was almost grey. Regretfully Auguste had to leave his curiosity unsatisfied and depart.

  With a slight sigh, Nollins turned from the cheerless spectacle of the relentless rain outside to the equally cheerless one within, to continue his thankless task of pointing out the dire consequences of the decision just taken. His fellow committee members were all, for their different reasons, reluctant to catch his eye. Being secretary was difficult enough at the best of times, but now . . . For the hundredth time he wished he had accepted his brother-in-law’s invitation to join in running his pig farm. Northumberland seemed suddenly a totally desirable distance from St James’s Square.

  True, for the five years he’d been secretary, there’d been nothing worse than a blackballing, complaints over the food – the latter before the advent of Didier, of course – and Lord Bulstrode’s indiscretions to deal with. Now, however, all was changed. He could disguise the fact no longer that there was something damned odd going on in Plum’s. In Plum’s of all places. Yet, he seemed to be the only person to be aware of it. It was almost as though there were a conspiracy of silence to ig
nore it.

  Worst of all, Nollins looked despondently round the table, now his fellow committee members seemed to have taken leave of their senses, in addition to totally ignoring any suggestion that anything could possibly, possibly be wrong at Plum’s. A dark cloud hung over the future of the club that had nothing to do with the unfortunate occurrences of the last few weeks. Slowly he returned to his seat, sat down and took up the minute book in front of him.

  ‘Gentlemen, as secretary of Plum’s I hereby confirm, that in accordance with the vote just recorded in this room . . .’

  Each word drove a death wound into civilisation as he knew it. 1896 and a new century about to dawn. What would it bring? Could they not see that decisions like today’s were the gateway to disaster?

  ‘. . . This decision to be reviewed in future years,’ he finished bleakly.

  He couldn’t understand how it had happened. Seven votes to two. Two opposed to the motion, he – and Worthington. Whoever would have thought that he and Worthington, the club bore, would be on the same side? How had it all come about? Everyone had been equally appalled on the day the Suggestions Book had been reviewed, so vehement in their assertions that Plum’s would go to the dogs if it were adopted. Yet somehow the unthinkable had happened.

  For the duration of the banquet known as Plum’s Passing ladies are to be admitted by invitation on to the premises of Plum’s.

  Ponderously Colonel Worthington cleared his throat and stood up; for once he was mercifully brief: ‘Gentlemen, not one of us here today can foresee the momentous consequences that will ensue from this day’s actions.’

  And in this, it is true to say, he was only too correct.

  Chapter One

  The blood gushed out, as with a concerted shriek two hundred people saw the farmer’s gory head fall into the basket beneath.

  ‘Yowch,’ gulped Emma, clutching uncharacteristically on to Auguste Didier’s arm, who in truth was hard put to it himself to maintain the calm his masculine pride required.

  Equanimity was restored when the head was placed on the table and proceeded to have an animated discussion on the rights and wrongs of his decapitation with the black-suited gentleman who had performed the deed. Emma’s white kid glove restored itself to its former position, and gasps turned from horror to amazement. For Auguste the glories of Messrs Maskelyne, Devant and Cooke on the first floor of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly transported him for once far away from the excitements of his duties as maitre chef of Plum’s Club for Gentlemen. Yet, as the Gloucestershire-farmer illusion gave place to more gentle spectacles, that niggle at the back of his mind returned. His rational mind had no doubt that the illusions he had seen that evening could be explained in the same way as the wonders of a soufflé aux violettes, and the same must therefore apply to the odd occurrences at Plum’s. But the uneasiness persisted; an uneasiness he had not felt since his previous employment at the Galaxy Theatre. There odd events had led to the same brutality as the spectacle before them presented this evening. Murder.

  And the signs had been there – for those that had eyes to see. Then he smiled at himself. At Plum’s? He was letting his French emotions take precedence over his English common sense. Murder at Plum’s? Impossible.

  ‘Ahit.’

  The rest of the sentence died on Osric’s lips as he observed to his bewilderment that so far from its being a hit, Hamlet’s rapier had missed Laertes by a good six inches. Then the sound of the cannonshot being mistimed offstage by Jenks distracted him and by the time he gave his full concentration to the Prince of Denmark once more, Hamlet was shouting triumphantly: ‘Another hit!’

  The rapier had more nearly pierced a nearby column than Laertes’ arm as William Shakespeare had stipulated. Laertes, a young and enthusiastic actor, playing his first major part, failed to take the hint that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, however, and swept on with gusto.

  ‘Have at you now.’

  He was much surprised, accordingly, when far from pressing forward to plunge his rapier into Hamlet’s body, he found himself inexorably driven backwards by a valiantly parring and thrusting Gaylord Erskine across the huge stage of the Sheridan Theatre and into the wings.

  ‘Part them; they are incens’d,’ murmured the King weakly, left gazing into the wings at his disappearing colleagues and wondering whether he was by mistake taking part in one of the versions of Hamlet with a happy ending.

  ‘The rapiers,’ hissed Erskine to a gaping stage manager, seizing the offending implement from Laertes’ hand. ‘Look at them – unbated.’ Several pairs of fascinated eyes stared at the lethal points, without their covering buttons. Then a courtier, standing on stage stolidly and conveniently nearby, was all but jerked off his feet into the wings by a quick-witted Props tugging at his doublet, and divested of his sword. A similar fate befell the courtier standing next to him. The audience meanwhile stirred uneasily, until reassured by the sight of the duelling adversaries fighting their way out of the wings back across the stage, while Laertes rose nobly to the occasion and invented several lines on behalf of William Shakespeare.

  ‘Have at you,’ he offered, already, with that part of an actor’s mind always divorced from his actions, seeing headlines in the newspapers. ‘You dog,’ he added in an excess of enthusiasm.

  This time to his relief, Hamlet condescended to be wounded, staggering gracefully as only Gaylord Erskine could; his duty done, Laertes collapsed thankfully upon the stage dead, and lay meditating confusedly on the events of the past ten minutes.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault, Mr Erskine,’ Laertes stuttered wildly at the inquest afterwards. ‘If you recall—’

  But Gaylord Erskine’s eloquent eyes were not fixed upon him, but upon the Property Master.

  Props, however, was made of stern stuff.

  ‘I take no responsibility, Mr Erskine,’ he said firmly. ‘You brought these rapiers in yourself today. Wanted to use them at a private function, you said. I can’t take no blame for—’

  There was an exclamation from Erskine.

  ‘True, Mr Jenks, I had forgotten. Pray accept my apologies.’

  ‘It must have been an accident,’ compromised Props kindly.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Erskine non-committally, and the matter was closed.

  But Gaylord Erskine’s dresser found him in silent mood. Erskine was well aware that it was no accident. Yesterday, he had given a private performance of Hamlet at Maltbury Towers, seat of Lord and Lady Maltbury, with a supporting cast of – he shuddered at the memory – the members of the Maltbury Hunt. Today he had brought his costume and the two rapiers back to London, and taken luncheon at the club, leaving them unguarded in the cloakroom. And since it could hardly be imagined that the Maltbury Hunt would have any desire to tamper with the rapiers, one could only assume that the mischief had taken place at the club. Just one of several incidents. His memoirs donated to the library mutilated, among those of others. His portrait defaced. The anonymous letter with the death threat awaiting him in Peeps’ pigeonholes. These latter incidents were annoyances. They could be attributed to someone who opposed his election. But tonight there had been a hint of more dangerous, even murderous intent.

  He had no option, he realised. He would have to tell Nollins, and let him decide whether to summon the police. But who could dislike, hate him so much? That, to reiterate his words of earlier that evening, was the question.

  So absorbed was Erskine as he left the theatre that he had entirely failed to notice the figure lurking in the shadows of the Sheridan stage door, hat drawn down, and scarf muffling the face in the best traditions of the Strand Magazine. He was quite respectable, no criminal, no down-at-heel vagabond, and attracting no notice as he stood quietly watching Gaylord Erskine strolling along the Strand on his way to Plum’s.

  Earlier that evening Colonel M. Worthington (somehow he was always so thought of) had left the depths of his leather armchair in his bachelor lodgings in South Audley Street, in order to make his acc
ustomed way to his other leather armchair at Plum’s. The chair by established custom was reserved for him, and woe betide any foolhardy newcomer who knowingly or unknowingly trespassed on its contours. He timed his arrival at Plum’s precisely for seven o’clock, as he had done ever since his retirement from the 24th Foot fifteen years before.

  ‘That’s how we did things at Chillianwallah,’ he would explain to anyone who was unwise enough to listen. In his late sixties, he lived a quiet life. He never mentioned a wife. In fact, he mentioned little else save the glorious doings of the 24th Foot and the perils of Chillianwallah. On his later career he was silent. India, the India of this fellow Kipling, was his battleground as a subaltern in the Sikh war. If one mentioned India – though no one ever did for fear of a half-hour lecture on tactics – a glow would come into his eyes, and a faraway expression of content as the coals burned on in Plum’s Adam fireplace, said to have been donated by the Iron Duke himself.

  ‘Grazie, signor.’

  The Italian bagpiper, trying a new beat in Piccadilly, had misjudged his man in sending his bambinos to plead for reward.

  ‘They should be in the nursery, man.’ Worthington glared. ‘That’s the place for children. At home.’

  The bagpiper looked blank. Nursery? Home? Home was the noise and bustle of Clerkenwell, the Piggy Wiggy pork shops, the barbers, the Restaurant Italiano Milard where tomorrow being Friday, the Italians’ lazy day, he would be spending the results of today’s labours.

  ‘That’s how we did things at Chillianwallah,’ grunted Worthington, sensing victory over his adversary. He pontificated on conjugal and family life with all the authority of a childless man. A rumour circulated that once in his youth he had been married, but in an excess of gallantry had left his young wife in England while he went out to face the hot season in India. Two months later, instead of boarding the steamer for the East, she climbed aboard a train for Wigan in the company of a music-hall artiste and was never seen again.