Murder in Pug's Parlour Read online

  ‘Isn’t this murder exciting, Arthur?’ Lady Jane was very young, and she hadn’t liked Greeves at all.

  He looked at her patronisingly. ‘That’s servants’ business, Jane. Nothing to do with us at all. Don’t bother your pretty little head about it.’

  He didn’t bother his about it much either. For, as yet, murder was contained behind the fastness of that green baize door.

  Mrs Honoria Hartham laughed quietly. She was famous for her laugh. It had a chuckling, throaty quality that conjured up fantasies in men’s minds and had done so for over twenty years. Her Grace and Mrs Hartham entered a conspiracy of silence about their ages and, if their figures, like trees, bore any clue to their years, these were known only to their intimate ladies’-maids. Drawn to Laetitia in their common defiance of time, a bond hitherto reciprocated by Her Grace in gratitude at being released from wifely duties to His Grace, they were each other’s greatest friends.

  ‘Oh, Your Highness, now we mustn’t dance together again. It is just the teensiest bit naughty of you to insist on it.’ She tapped his wrist playfully with her fan.

  Prince Franz was a little put out. He did not like being slapped playfully on the wrist and, moreover, he had not asked Mrs Hartham to dance but had been skilfully manoeuvred into a position where it would have been pointed to refuse. It was not his policy to offend ladies, and he capitulated. Yet he was equally upset at the thought of annoying Laetitia – no light matter, sure though he was of his hold over her. He dreaded warring women around him, a situation he never courted. It was time he married. He was in his late thirties. His Imperial Majesty the Kaiser Wilhelm II liked his envoys to be married, particularly his London envoys whom he was eager to mould into the model domestic pattern established by Albert the Good. This could not fail to find favour with dear Grandmamma, Her Gracious Majesty Victoria. Appointed to the London embassy in 1888, the Prince had fought against marriage for marriage’s sake for some time, but the Kaiser had made his views quite plain in Franz’s last visit to Berlin. There was enough choice. His figure was stocky but his height made this less noticeable, and his romantic looks, so reminiscent of the Good Albert himself, ensured that there would be no lack of candidates for his hand. But he had this distaste for women squabbling. It was boring. Sex was sex, for children and home; that he accepted. Here in England he found more was expected – social coquetry, in which he found himself unfortunately accomplished – and successful. After all, one must conform.

  ‘Madame, I am the happiest man alive. Who would not steal your time when he knows himself unworthy of being granted it by favour.’

  Honoria’s heart danced. This was romance indeed. A prince. Just what she needed to take Cecil’s most unwarranted suspicions away from her relationship with George. The Honourable Mr Hartham was a strict man of impeccable upbringing, a member of a highly religious and moral family. A family that had strongly disapproved of his marrying Miss Honoria Mossop with her kittenish ways and lack of family or money. They had been somewhat mollified when she obediently produced three impeccable and highly religious boys but scandalised when, duty done, she proceeded to join the fast Prince of Wales’ set. Her husband, spending a few weeks at their Scottish estate, inculcating a sense of feudal pride into his sons, had been convinced that no harm could come to his wife under the roof of one of the noblest of English peers, until a strange necklace turned up among Honoria’s jewels. She had explained it away and believed herself safe – until Greeves . . . If only that man hadn’t seen George coming from her room that night.

  She shivered. The Prince mistook it for excitement and a sense of doom overtook him.

  She saw the shadow. ‘Come, Your Highness. You need not despair of my favour. You rate yourself too modestly.’ She chuckled.

  The Marquise de Lavallée’s eyes twinkled. She hadn’t had such a good evening for a long time. At sixty-two she was forced to be an onlooker at most things – not, thank Heaven, those that mattered. But this evening there was a rare sport of a murder in a ducal house. The Duke and Duchess, whom she liked, had been ruffled and perplexed at this disturbance to the ordered precision of life. She doubted if they really appreciated what had taken place and wondered if, when they did, the tradition of centuries would guide them through this crisis as it had through so many others. Ah, these English. Instead of revelling in it, they would pretend it had not happened, sweep it below stairs, back behind the baize door. In addition to these interesting speculations, she had watched the pretty child Jane’s flirtation with the handsome, enigmatic Lord Arthur; and caught the look in that fascinating young man’s eye. Now if she were Lady Jane . . .

  But no, she was merely an onlooker. Save in one respect. She looked possessively and with affection at Francois. Her private secretary who accompanied her everywhere, her very private secretary. These things were understood in France. But here in England, how shocked Her Grace would be at the thought of a thirty-three-year-old man creeping into the bed of an old woman of sixty-two, long since widowed. She would not think for a moment of her own sin in leaving the bed of her very much alive husband to run to the arms of a lover, only to change him like the season’s fashions when the amusement palled. They did not understand in this cold England that the body of a woman was ageless, that it demanded love at seventy as it had at seventeen, that a woman of experience might have something to offer a shy, retiring young man in his thirties.

  From his chair next to hers at one end of the ballroom he smiled at her now. That special smile that he used in their secret moments together.

  ‘Madame . . .?’

  She sighed. Even in France it was not permitted to make public display. She tapped his hand gently with her ivory fan. ‘Monsieur Pradel, je réfléchis. This murder, will they suspect us, do you think?’

  He turned liquid brown eyes on her in amazement. ‘Us, Madame?’

  You know, Francois, to what I refer.’

  His eyes were filled with anger. ‘To protect you, Madame – ma vie . . .’

  That serious young man Walter Marshall sat patiently waiting for his waltz. He had spent a dutiful half-hour with his fellow guests (male), partaking of brandy and cigars while the ladies withdrew, and endured the usual ill-informed political discussion – not, as the ladies unfairly assumed, a discussion of the rival merits of Lillie Langtry and Lady Warwick as mistresses, past and present, to the Prince of Wales. It had been somewhat stilted in this house party owing to the presence of the Kaiser’s envoy Prince Franz and views about whether or not Germany had aggressive intentions towards England could not be fully aired.

  Since then he had circled the floor with a bishop’s wife, sat out under the potted palms with young Mrs Herbert, danced in stately manner with the Marquise, and paid exactly the right number of compliments to Her Grace. Her Grace was very charming to him, but he knew steel when he met it. He was not on the Duchess’ list of possible sons-in-law. Now he was sitting waiting for Jane. He had thought of her thus for a long time. Ever since he first met her four years ago, when she was still in the schoolroom, still somewhat pudgy, hair all over the place. She had been in a tree at the time, and, finding descent more perilous then ascent, had been compelled to seek help from the first person that passed. It had been he. He had obliged and, taking her for a servant as she was simply dressed in a print gown, had reprimanded her on the dangers of fair young ladies of tender years putting themselves in positions where they were obliged to expose far more of their (undoubtedly shapely) limbs than was modest. On its being pointed out that he was addressing the only daughter of the Duke himself, he replied, not a whit abashed, that in that event the lecture was even more deserved. Since that meeting he had not been in the least doubt that he was going to marry her.

  He was twenty-seven, private secretary to Lord Medhurst, destined as Minister of Commerce in a future Liberal government. He was deemed to have a political future. To be an up-and-coming young man, despite the fact he had once been observed talking to that dreadful fellow Kei
r Hardie. Yet, since he showed no signs of realising the enormity of his actions, it was in time considered rather daring and public-spirited of him to speak with the head of that funny little Scottish Labour party.

  He had been invited because Her Grace considered it useful to have a political face present, to counter rumours that she had purely frivolous house parties. She had made private enquiries as to his family and, upon discovering his school had been Shrewsbury and his family insignificant – his grandfather had been a mere baronet – had dismissed him as a contender for Jane’s hand. He was unassuming, a good conversationalist and since he was not on her list it had never occurred to Her Grace, until this evening, that he presented any threat at all.

  Nor had it occurred to Lady Jane.

  ‘Well, Mr Marshall, after your previous enthusiasm, you appear, if I may say so, a little lackadaisical in your attentions. I believe it time for our dance,’ she remarked righteously now, appearing by his side.

  He rose to his feet with a start, bowed and led her on to the floor.

  ‘My apologies, Lady Jane. You are very good to seek me out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane offhandedly, ‘I thought that too.’

  ‘I’m very honoured. Particularly when you are so much in demand.’

  Jane looked at him suspiciously, but he seemed to have nothing more on his mind than the negotiation of the corner of the dance floor.

  ‘Did you really forget?’ she asked ingenuously. ‘Or were you sulking?’

  He laughed, not apparently annoyed, which disappointed Jane. ‘No, I genuinely forgot.’

  ‘That’s not very flattering!’

  ‘The truth is always flattering to an intelligent person.’

  She thought about this, but he apparently didn’t need a reply for he continued: ‘I’d been thinking about your murder.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Jane.

  He smiled at her. ‘That was badly put. I mean, your steward Greeves’ murder.’

  ‘That’s all a lot of fuss about nothing. He was much too nasty a man to murder. They’ll find it was an accident.’

  ‘I wonder . . .’

  In the servants’ wing, all but those unfortunates detailed to wait until the last of the guests had disappeared, at least temporarily, into their bedrooms, the servants were preparing for their briefer hours of rest.

  In his room on the second floor, Auguste pulled his nightshirt over his head, welcoming the cool feel of the calico after the hot clamminess of his dress suit donned for servants’ supper and redolent of kitchen smells. He was more physically tired than he could ever remember, yet his brain was still whirling, a mass of conflicting thoughts.

  ‘Les ortolans – too brown. Four minutes only. Five at the most, and tonight they had six. Inattention to detail, so essential to a cook – and so essential in a murderer. How carefully Greeves’ murderer must have planned . . . The larks were too skinny. Thirteen ounces I said, not twelve. Les flancs. Diable!’ Had they been edible even? Had Gladys burnt the crème de cacao just a little? No, there would have been complaints, and he had heard nothing. The familiar murmur of contented voices had met his ears as he opened the door to the garden for a breath of the sharp night air. The sound of those that had dined well. Where else could people relax, be happy, be sensuous – and it was his food that made them so. They did not know how to enjoy food properly, these English; they thought it wrong. Yet they had the best food in the world if only they would appreciate it. And with the touch of a maître upon it, it was transformed into the ambrosia of the gods. It was his mission to save English cooking from itself. And now Monsieur Escoffier had come to the Savoy Hotel, between the two of them what triumphs they would achieve! Escoffier in London, himself in Kent – at first, but soon he would travel . . . Noble houses the length and breadth of England. This glowing thought died away and grimmer thoughts took its place, a kaleidoscope of ortolans, of death, of glasses of brandy, of Greeves and of blackmail, and those policemen rushing around like one of the choruses from those ridiculous Gilbert and Sullivan operas, looking so imposing in their helmets, but with little proceeding underneath them. He thought again of the evening’s chaos, policemen mixing with kitchen-maids and footmen as they examined the housekeeper’s stores, and sealed off Pug’s Parlour while his staff was trying to serve a banquet for over forty people, and make preparations for tomorrow’s grand buffet. It had not been easy. And he was tired – oh, so tired. He climbed thankfully into the small iron bed and extinguished the lamp.

  There was a quiet knock at the door. Before he could even think who could be knocking at this time of night, the door opened and a dark-clad slim girlish figure slipped in, two long plaits falling behind her pretty head, and with candle in hand.

  ‘Ethel!’ Auguste was horrified.

  ‘Oh don’t scold me, Mr Didier – Auguste. I had to come.’

  ‘But if you’d been seen!’ He was shocked – amongst other emotions. It would be instant dismissal for her, and probably for him too. These things had to be arranged with discretion . . . even by a maître chef.

  ‘I was ever so careful – I didn’t come up the men’s staircase.’ The male servants’ quarters on the second floor were reached by a staircase inaccessible to the women on the first floor, who were provided with their own staircase which, needless to say, did not connect with the second floor. ‘I came through the main house.’

  ‘You did what?’ said Auguste faintly. Was this his little Ethel, his English dove? He was obliged to regard her with a new admiration.

  ‘That way I could pretend I’d brought something to one of the rooms.’

  ‘But what if Mr Hobbs or Mr Chambers—’

  ‘Well, they didn’t,’ said Ethel shortly, dismissing the subject. ‘And when I go back, I’ll be just as careful.’

  ‘But perhaps you had better wait some time, hein?’ murmured Auguste, his arm reaching out automatically. But Ethel was intent on other matters than love.

  ‘The policeman said it’s now certain it was murder, Mr Didier. Who do you think did it?’ She turned large hopeful eyes on him.

  Auguste was torn between natural pride that he should be regarded as the fount of knowledge, and pique that she had not come to his room through an irresistible desire to be with him.

  ‘No, Estelle’ – this was his compromise to the ugly sound of Ethel. ‘My star, my little star’, he had called her on the first evening they had walked out. Ethel had liked that. No one had called her a little star in the Maidstone house where she’d been brought up. ‘But why do you have to come to ask me this now?’ he murmured. Naturally it was an excuse. She desired to be with him.

  ‘Oh, Mr Didier.’ Her large grey eyes brimmed over with tears, so that it seemed quite natural for Auguste to draw her closer and put his arm round her. ‘I’m afraid they’ll think I did it.’

  ‘You?’ He laughed aloud at the thought, then quickly stifled it, remembering Chambers in the next room. ‘Now why, chérie, should they think a little English maid like you should be capable of murder?’

  ‘Because I – there was a reason,’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘What?’ said Auguste, agog with curiosity. Ethel of all people.

  ‘He tried to – I don’t like to say . . .’

  ‘What?’ said Auguste, grimly.

  ‘He tried to – well – you know, in the parlour on Wednesday. And then when I wouldn’t, he said he’d get me dismissed . . . And oh, Mr Didier, what would I have done? What with no reference, I’d get no other job. And me mum needs the money. So you see, Mr Didier, you must find out who done it. They’ll think it’s me.’

  ‘But no one will know.’

  ‘Yes, he told me he’d spoken to Mrs Hankey. Lied about me . . . And she’ll tell the policemen. You won’t let them take me away, will you?’

  Auguste looked at the weeping girl, felt her shoulders heaving beneath his arm. He watched her breasts rising and falling under the plain black dress. He could stem those tears in the
best of all possible ways. But he was French and caution came before passion – and there was the memory of Tatiana’s lovely figure . . .

  He withdrew his arm and patted her briskly in the best approved English fashion.

  ‘No, my star,’ he murmured. ‘They will not harm you. I will discover this murderer for you.’

  ‘Edith,’ he had whispered, only last Sunday. ‘Just you and me, and a little cottage of our own. Think of that, eh?’

  ‘I’d like that, Archibald, yes. I want to be your wife. Look after you.’

  ‘You shall, Edith. Very soon.’

  Edith Hankey tossed and turned in her bed in her bedroom on the ground floor, as she had done all that week, remembering how Archibald had held her hand in that very room where he . . . Now she stared into a bleak future, an endless procession of years, holding office until she couldn’t run the Towers any more and was pensioned off – if she were lucky – to find a little room somewhere, alone. Then she thought of May Fawcett and her torment began again. She was glad he was dead now. Glad. How could he have deceived her so? That hussy. All those afternoons off when he said he was visiting his sick brother. And he’d been with her. Her. No, she was glad he was dead. He’d made a fool of her.

  Directly above, her rival tossed and turned in her smaller bed on the first floor. She had tried counting pins, tried counting Her Grace’s hats, but sleep would not come. She kept seeing the dead face of Archibald Greeves staring up at her.

  ‘What would the old Hankey say if she could see us?’ she’d giggled in Archibald’s arms only a week ago.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that old Kentish pudding. She thinks I’ve got my eye on her, just because I’m a bit sorry for her. But we know what’s what, don’t we?’ And the deceitful old goat had taken her in the parlour then and there, just where . . . And only a day later she caught him fondling the scullery maid! He was no good. It must have been him seduced Hobbs’ daughter after all. Well, she was glad he was dead!