Murder Under The Kissing Bough: (Auguste Didier Mystery 6) Read online

  Fancelli’s temper snapped. ‘Very well, I do the spotted dick. I do a very large spotted dick, so they all be fat. But it not be my dish. It be called Didier’s spotted dick. And after that I do everything à la Fancelli or that is all.’

  Quivering with fury, Auguste stormed from the kitchen, thankful that the majority of his guests had joined Maisie in a brisk walk in Hyde Park. Oblivious of the fact he was still clad in the apparel of his superseded profession, he hurried to the haven of his office. He was clearly not designed by nature to be a manager of men. He was a maître chef, not a hotelier. Yet had he not the right to say what should—

  A scream rent the air. A female scream. He catapulted out of his chair, through the door into the corridor. Flying towards him was a twin. Which one, he neither knew nor cared. His face darkened. He had not forgiven them for their practical joke of the evening before.

  ‘Non,’ he said firmly. ‘I am busy. I am not in the mood for jests.’

  ‘But Mr Didier,’ came the anguished cry.

  ‘Non.’ He went back into his office, but the hallowed sanctum was immediately invaded, as the door was flung open again with a crash.

  ‘You must, you must,’ she shrieked.

  Auguste Didier had had enough. ‘Non, there is no must.’

  ‘It’s the old oak chest. There’s something . . . Oh, you must.’

  ‘The chest? Your sister again?’ He went pale with anger, just as Ethel burst into tears.

  ‘No, and I’m telling you the truth.’

  Tears? Could they manage false tears too? Whether they could or not, Auguste was not proof against a young girl in tears. Very well, he sighed, he supposed he would play along with this stupid game.

  ‘Ma fille,’ he patted her shoulder in avuncular manner, ‘do not worry. Auguste Didier is here. Let us investigate ze ’orrible crime,’ he said melodramatically. ‘I, Sherlock, will solve it.’

  Taking her firmly by the hand, he led her still sobbing to the drawing room, where unaccountably she drew back. ‘You go,’ she quavered. ‘I couldn’t look again.’

  Auguste gave a heavy melodramatic sigh. ‘I understand, ma fille. This is man’s work,’ walking up to the chest, squaring his shoulders. He posed dramatically before it. ‘I, Auguste Didier, the famous detective, will now investigate the terrible death of Ginevra, beautiful bride of Lord Lovell.’

  He flung open the lid – and froze. No ghost, but quite clearly dead. She had been stabbed. There was no doubt about that, for the stiletto dagger was still stuck into the corpse’s breast, congealed blood evident on the thick cotton of her apron. It was the missing housemaid.

  Egbert Rose’s telephone was ringing. Sometimes, he thought sourly, Bell had done the world a distinct disservice. Semaphore was just as good. It took only two minutes to get orders from London to the coast at the time of the threatened invasion, and that was nearly a hundred years ago. His mind played with the idea of standing out on his balcony with a few flags, and crossly returned to reality as he barked into the telephone.

  ‘I have found you your body, Egbert,’ came Auguste’s quiet voice.

  Rose’s mind went blank. Body? What body? A rare anger overcame him. ‘If you’re making another monkey out of me—’ Rose took hold of himself. ‘Is this one going to disappear by the time I get there?’ he asked sarcastically, then was immediately ashamed of himself as he took in the tone of Auguste’s voice.

  ‘No, Egbert, it will not disappear.’

  A body? He’d have to send Twitch, was his instant reaction. He couldn’t go himself, take time away from this all-important job. Then he reconsidered. Why not? Nothing was happening. He could at least see this corpse. He owed Auguste that.

  Auguste reminded himself that he was looking on the face of a murderess, not the bride of young Lovell. But in death she might well have been. For all the impersonality of death, her face was fair. The face of a girl too young to die. Like the girl in the fog, her victim. He shut the lid again hurriedly, hearing again the voice of this girl crying: ‘At Cranton’s? Christmas?’ And then had come the muffled choking. Now the murderess herself lay dead, murdered in the same way. Odd. Or was it vengeance? But if vengeance, how had the avenger known how the girl in the fog had died?

  He puzzled over this for a few minutes; partly to take his mind off the awful object so near to him. Egbert would soon be here. He would need to be told again everything that happened on that November night. A small twinge of satisfaction caught Auguste even in the midst of such tragic surroundings that Twitch might have the grace to apologise for his crude gloating.

  He ran over in his mind all that had happened on that foggy afternoon. Finding Portman Mews, realising where he was, crawling along the railings that guarded the semi-basement kitchen area, then the words ahead of him coming out of bleak dampness. Those words: Cranton’s and Christmas. A pause. Then the chilling sound of choking. Then nothing, only himself left alone with a body. The murderess had escaped – until he had recognised her voice again.

  Then he realised that like Fancelli’s forcemeat, something was not quite right here. Left alone with a body . . . How did he know that? He, Auguste Didier, had been guilty of jumping to conclusions. Because he had heard only two female voices, because he had heard this girl’s voice, he had assumed she was the murderess. But suppose there had been a third person present at the scene, a man or woman who had crept up and murdered the one girl as the other departed. Then, he reasoned, knowing that the fatal words Cranton’s and Christmas had been passed on, he or she had bided his time, assuming his prey would be present. The girl murdered in the fog could have passed on more information to this unfortunate girl in the chest, information that made her removal imperative. Yet the girl in the fog had been a housemaid – that was strange. What could a young housemaid know that would threaten someone enough to commit murder? And how, he wondered suddenly, did she know about Cranton’s when staff were not hired until early December, after the murder? Perhaps she was not really a housemaid. Yet what evidence did he have for absolving this girl from murder? This girl so young, in her early twenties, deprived of life, so that now he fiercely wanted to prove her victim, not murderess. Evidence? Yes. There had been silence after the cry. No running footsteps. Did that not imply the murderer was there, all the time, as he, Auguste, had found the body? He shivered.

  ‘Morning, Auguste.’

  Deep in his thoughts, he had been unaware of Egbert Rose entering the room behind him. ‘Not pretty,’ Rose said at last as Auguste opened the heavy rounded lid to show him the contents.

  ‘Non.’

  ‘Who found it?’

  ‘One of my guests,’ he replied mechanically.

  ‘Your guests?’ Rose looked at him curiously.

  Auguste shrugged. It seemed so unimportant now, this clutch at a lifetime’s dream. ‘I am the manager,’ he told him.

  ‘Nice place.’ Rose looked round approvingly at some of Adam’s best work. ‘Who is she?’ he went on. ‘The girl in the fog?’

  Auguste looked at him gratefully. ‘No. The girl I told you had disappeared. One of the staff.’

  ‘And you reckon she’s your murderess?’ Rose stared down at the corpse.

  ‘I had thought so.’ Auguste hesitated. ‘I have been guilty, Inspector Rose,’ (this was a formal occasion) ‘of a perhaps incorrect conclusion. When I was present at the murder in the fog,’ he said with some emphasis, ‘I heard this woman’s voice; of that I am sure. I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that she was the murderess, for I was only aware of the two persons. But there was a gap between her voice and the choking cry. Suppose someone else was there?’

  ‘Still got to find your first body,’ Rose pointed out, after digesting this.

  ‘I have one body for you, Egbert,’ Auguste burst out. ‘As you requested. Is one not enough to make you believe what I say?’

  Rose looked at him for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll put some men on it. River search. Mortuary search. Some of the b
odies that come out of that river don’t get too much investigation.’

  ‘And this unfortunate girl?’ Auguste asked quietly. ‘I –’ he hesitated, then continued, ‘I have a hotel to run. It is not usual to present a Christmas party with a real corpse in the drawing room. It is my first hotel,’ he added rather pathetically.

  Rose considered this. Normally he wouldn’t, but this was Auguste pleading. ‘Where are your guests now?’

  ‘Most are in the park. Colonel Carruthers, I believe, is in the study. Miss Ethel who found the body has returned to her room with her maid.’

  Rose mused for a moment, as the front doors opened and Twitch appeared self-importantly, leading a phalanx of police constables and, in their midst, the police doctor.

  ‘No help for it,’ Rose said reluctantly. ‘We’ll have to block this room off for a while, both entrances. And search the bedrooms.’

  ‘Where are my guests to go?’ moaned Auguste white-faced, feeling personally responsible and remembering his all too public wish on the turkey bone. They would blame him. Of course they would.

  Seeing Auguste’s pale face, Rose said to him kindly, ‘Why don’t we go to your office, Auguste? We’ve got a lot of talking to do.’

  It was out of his hands, thought Auguste wretchedly. A murder had taken place at Cranton’s; and what was worse, publicly. It could not be swept aside, removed to the servants’ quarters. It affected them all. Even the kitchens. A terrible thought struck him.

  ‘Luncheon?’ he asked miserably.

  Rose understood his problem immediately. ‘Where’s the dining room?’

  ‘Opposite. The other side of the front door.’

  ‘Put them in there straightaway,’ suggested Rose with all the optimism of one who had never attempted to organise fourteen people into doing something they had no inclination to do.

  Auguste sighed as he entered the dining room. He had spent an exhausting hour with Egbert, recounting yet again every detail of that November night. They had even gone out into the mews and retraced his footsteps.

  ‘So you were here, you reckon, when you heard these sounds. Choking like?’

  ‘Perhaps the murderer put a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound.’

  ‘Because of the pub, maybe.’ Rose stared at the Three Tuns. ‘You say you didn’t see it was here. Odd,’ he remarked without emphasis. ‘It’s big enough.’

  ‘No,’ said Auguste sharply. ‘I concentrated on going forward. The sound was in front. And this was a peasouper. It was late afternoon. There would be little sound from the pub.’

  ‘True,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll talk to them anyway. So what then? You heard the sound – where did you find the body?’

  Auguste shut his eyes, clung to the railings, and tried to remember. He inched forward, feeling out for obstacles, to the great interest of a passing ten-year-old chimney sweep for whom Christmas festivity was a matter for others. ‘Been on the gin, ’as ’e, mister?’ he asked Rose, one man to another.

  ‘That he has, laddy. The Yard keeps an eye on ’im, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Cor!’ said the lad, impressed.

  ‘I think here was the body,’ announced Auguste with dignity, having advanced ten yards or so.

  Rose joined him. He looked around. ‘Difficult to get rid of in a peasouper. And it was only two hours or so later that I got here. Not a lot of time to get rid of it, in that weather, even if you were in the pub by that time.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Auguste, struck by a sudden thought, ‘it was kept down there in Cranton’s basement area till night-time.’

  ‘Searched there,’ grunted Rose. ‘Looked there myself.’

  ‘Even in the rubbish cupboard?’ asked Auguste quickly, pointing to a door out of sight on the pavement side.

  Rose almost blushed. ‘Couldn’t swear to it.’ They exchanged a doubtful look.

  ‘No,’ said Auguste, ‘surely it couldn’t still be there. It has been used since.’

  They both relaxed. One body was quite enough for a Boxing Day.

  ‘He could have broken into the hotel to hide it in the cellars,’ pointed out Auguste, anxious to absolve Rose from any hint of blame.

  ‘Could be. One broken door here or there wouldn’t be noticed when our Maisie’s builders moved in.’ Rose brightened up. ‘Funny feet the Queen must have,’ he said thoughtfully as they walked back.

  ‘Pardon?’ Auguste enquired, startled.

  ‘That sign up there.’ He jerked a finger at the building opposite. ‘Rodways Patent Concave Shoes. It’s got the royal arms above it. Perhaps the Prince of Wales patronises them – he has a lot of standing about to do.’ He spoke lightly, but the disagreeable thought struck him that unless he got a move on, His Royal Highness’s standing about could be cut short very suddenly indeed.

  Now, however, Auguste was on his own once more, to face his disgruntled guests in the dining room, disgruntled through no fault of his.

  ‘I don’t want a drink from the damned wassail bowl. I want to go to my room.’ Colonel Carruthers’s pithy statements seemed to sum up the general mood.

  ‘I regret it is not possible to visit your rooms for the moment.’ Auguste looked anxiously round his flock, whose expressions varied from impatience to curiosity. Even Maisie looked somewhat annoyed.

  ‘Come on, Auguste. Stop playing games!’ she ordered him informally. ‘Why’s there a policeman on the front door, and why have we been herded in here like a load of pigs to a trough?’

  ‘Murder,’ announced Auguste succinctly.

  An astounded silence.

  ‘Murder?’ repeated Thérèse. She laughed. ‘But we are all here.’

  ‘One of the maids.’

  ‘One of them?’ Harbottle pointed a somewhat disdainful thumb towards the nether regions. ‘But why should we be put to inconvenience?’

  Colonel Carruthers had been thinking. Now he exploded. ‘Good God, you mean we’re suspects, don’t you? That’s why we’re here in the dining room. Sorry for the girl. But what about our luncheon? No sign of it yet.’

  ‘The body has only just been discovered,’ said Auguste quietly. ‘The police must examine the scene, and we must avoid it for a short time. Arrangements are being made for luncheon.’

  ‘Where was the body found?’ asked Bowman, for once not laughing.

  ‘In a large chest by the window,’ replied Auguste reluctantly.

  A moment for this to sink in, then: ‘You mean where I was last night?’ shrieked Evelyn.

  ‘Yes, Miss Pembrey. I regret that your sister found the body. She is lying down, being tended by her maid.’

  ‘Oh, it was my fault. She said she would look for the brooch that I lost last night,’ cried Evelyn, woebegone. ‘She said she wanted to stay here, so she might as well hunt for it. She must have thought of the chest. Oh!’ Rosanna put her arm round her to comfort her.

  ‘It’s just like your story of the Bride in the Chest, isn’t it?’ chattered Gladys, eyes glowing. ‘Murder under the Kissing Bough. The Skeleton at the Feast. So she was murdered while we were out,’ she added inconsequentially.

  ‘Or during the night,’ said Auguste. ‘She was missing yesterday however. I was making enquiries.’ No indiscretion in his saying so, for his enquiries had been public enough.

  ‘Why were you looking for her?’ asked Thérèse curiously.

  ‘I – I thought I recognised her and wished to speak to her, but I could not find her. She might have been killed yesterday.’

  ‘No,’ wailed Evelyn, ‘I was in the chest last night. It must have been today.’

  ‘Then that would be a good place to hide the body,’ observed Gladys. ‘No one would think of searching there after Miss Pembrey had been in it.’ Her eyes were agleam. She was a devotee of the adventures of Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, and was now demonstrating her methods.

  ‘Since we have mostly come from overseas, I do not see how we can be suspects,’ said Harbottle nervously.

  Sir John Harnet, Bowman and
Carruthers looked at each other. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ they said in unison, as the enormity of this statement sank in.

  ‘Are the police looking for a jealous lover?’ asked Gladys excitedly. ‘It’s usually them, you know.’

  The Marquis stood up. ‘I have diplomatic immunity, Mr Didier. My wife and I will leave immediately.’

  ‘Oh no, Gaston,’ cried Bella instantly. ‘Think how bad that will look. And think what excitement we will miss.’

  The Marquis fastened on to the important words: ‘look bad’. ‘French Colonial Office diplomat hurriedly leaves scene of crime,’ he imagined the English newspapers shouting to the world. He slowly resumed his seat. ‘Very well, we will remain – for a short period only.’

  Egbert Rose came in. ‘Mr Didier will have explained to you what has happened. We’re sorry to have to keep you here a while longer, but we need to make a search of your rooms, I’m afraid. Do any of you have any objection?’

  There was instant uproar. The words ‘Diplomatic immunity’, ‘private papers, very private papers’ could just be discerned in the outrage. When it had died down, Bella’s voice could be heard remarking cheerfully, ‘You are at liberty to search among my chemises and stays, if you wish, Inspector.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Rose replied stolidly, as reluctant permission seemed forthcoming from the assembled guests. ‘Meanwhile,’ his eye caught Auguste’s, ‘luncheon is ready for you below. We need to search this room now. Mr Didier will show you the way.’

  Reluctantly, Auguste rose. The moment he had feared. The moment when, as a reluctant Pied Piper, he must herd his band down the cellar steps, out along a candlelit, cold corridor, past the laundry, scullery and kitchens, and into the basement room normally devoted to the repasts of maids, valets and staff. Even luncheon could not compensate for this indignity to a manager’s self-respect.

  ‘Been dead some hours at least, the doc says. She was probably killed during the night – the risk would be too great otherwise. We won’t know for sure until the PM.’

  ‘Was she killed there?’ asked Auguste, then realised his stupidity. Of course she could not have been killed in the chest or even in the drawing room, unless it was a crime on the spur of the moment and that was very unlikely. One did not choose a midnight encounter for casual conversation.