Mr Campion's Seance, page 6
‘Don’t worry about Rupert,’ said Mr Campion, pouring tea into his wife’s proffered cup. ‘Lugg was up with the lark, which was just as well as Rupert was up before the lark, demanding another parade and more fireworks. Lugg had him washed, dressed and breakfasted before I could raise a sleepy eyebrow. He’s now taken him for a walk in search of a newspaper and some off-ration sweets.’
‘I don’t think we should encourage that,’ said his wife in a tone which brooked little argument.
‘Come, come, my dear, you know as well as I do that if Lugg gets his hands on an illicit Mars Bar or a tube of Rolos, Rupert would only get half at best. Lugg’s sweet tooth may well get the better of him one day, but the lad has only known rationing and shortage, so let him enjoy a treat now and then. What about you? Can I get you some breakfast? There’s a crust of bread which I could probably convert into toast without burning the flat down and, thanks to Lugg, we have plenty of bacon. No eggs, though, I’m afraid.’
‘Tea will be fine,’ said Amanda, sitting down opposite her husband at the small kitchen table. ‘You can take us somewhere nice for lunch before we go back to the country.’
‘Ah, now, about that,’ Campion said hesitantly, ‘we may have to stay in town another night.’
Amanda turned her heart-shaped face to one side to study her husband and opened her eyes wide. Campion recognized it as her I’m making a polite enquiry, but I know something’s going on expression.
‘Is it to do with the offer from the Colonial Office?’ she asked delicately.
‘Oh, the Caribbean thing,’ said Campion, mildly surprised. ‘No, it’s not, though it was hardly a job offer, more a suggestion, and I’m not sure we should consider it seriously. I mean, you would be torn away from your career, Rupert would grow up without knowing what a decent smog looked like, and Lugg would spend his days like a stranded whale lying on a beach under a palm tree drinking rum.’
Amanda considered these options. ‘Probably for the best if you turn it down,’ she said at last. ‘Lugg would only attract sand flies. He’d hate it, especially when the rum ran out.’
‘They make quite a lot in the Caribbean,’ observed Mr Campion.
‘Not enough for Lugg. So what is to keep us in London?’ Even as she asked, her expression changed. ‘It’s about that book you told me to read last night, isn’t it?’
‘Have you finished it?’
‘Not quite, I’m about three-quarters of the way through, so don’t you dare tell me who did it.’
‘Not having read it myself, I cannot, but I assumed from the cover that the cigarette girl was a prime suspect,’ Campion teased.
‘Now that’s what’s called an apprentice error. In detective stories, it’s never the most obvious person, in this case, the cigarette girl at the Reynard Club, even though she had the means, motive and opportunity.’
‘I am sure your conclusion is perfectly sound, darling, and you are a loss to Scotland Yard. Would you mind telling me about it?’
‘Telling you what?’
‘The plot, the setting, those sort of things.’
‘Why?’
‘Humour me, please. Naturally I’m interested in the latest creation of my godsibling.’
‘Are you sure there really is such a thing as a godsibling? I think you made that up and, anyway, why not read it yourself?’
‘You know I’m of a delicate constitution and reading such racy material would no doubt give me heart palpitations and cruelly fray my nerves. Besides, I value your opinion above all others. I presume it has something to do with a murder at one of those rather dubious clubs which host bottle parties.’
‘Well, that’s fairly obvious from the title, and I suppose it might cause a rise in blood pressure among members of the club you belong to.’
‘Puffins? I should say so! Apart from The Times and Wisden’s, reading is positively discouraged at the Junior Greys. Can’t have anything inflaming the members.’
‘The Bottle Party Murders certainly would. Evadne Childe doesn’t pull her punches about the goings-on in these places.’
‘Does she write from personal experience?’ Campion asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘If you mean, does she go around murdering people, of course not, but she is noted for her immaculate and detailed research. She would have visited one or more of these shady clubs as background for her setting. The club in her book is called Reynard’s, which is the fox in some medieval fable.’
‘Reynard the Trickster, some called him. The stories come from the Low Countries I think,’ said Campion. ‘It’s quite a well-known cycle of tales which have been plundered by many a writer down the centuries. Apart from Reynard the fox, there was Bruin the bear, Chanticleer the cockerel and Tybalt the cat, who pops up in Shakespeare, if memory serves. The Dutch Nazi Party made an atrocious anti-Semitic cartoon film of the fables back in ’42. Horrible, quite horrible, but so bad hardly anyone saw it, thank goodness.’
‘Stop showing off, Albert.’
‘I’m sorry, darling, don’t let me interrupt your flow.’
‘So, Reynard’s is a hotbed of vice, not only drinking out of licensing hours, but running card games and roulette for select customers – some of whom are socially very well-connected – and then there are the girls who encourage customers to buy them champagne, which is usually coloured soda water at two-and-six the glass. Sometimes the girls act as dance hostesses when there’s music and the dancing often leads to other things, and more money changes hands. Needless to say, the customers are invariably men, though females are attracted to some of the card games – a certain type of female, that is. Most of the working girls in these places seem to be very young and Belgian, pretending to be French.’
‘That’s certainly accurate,’ said Campion, who was immediately fixed by his wife’s chilling stare.
‘And you know that how?’
‘The Public Morality Council, which has been combatting vice and indecency in London since 1899, according to its own publicity material, issued reports throughout the war saying exactly that. I do try to keep up with the PMC’s reports as they make riveting reading, and my godmother, who is also godmother to Evadne Childe, sits on their board – or at least she used to and probably still thinks she does.’
‘Hmmm.’ Amanda left a pregnant pause before continuing. ‘Well, you get the idea. The club generates a large amount of cash for the owner, an all-round sleazy character called Jake Muscat.’
‘I make it a rule of life never to trust anyone called Jake,’ said Campion. ‘Would he, by any chance, be Maltese?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Shot in the dark, my dear. One hates to generalize, but the Maltese have got themselves a bit of a reputation when it comes to organizing crime in Soho. I take it your Reynard’s Club is in Soho?’
‘I think technically it’s supposed to be in Mayfair, just off Grafton Street, but she keeps it pretty vague. After all, it’s fiction. Reynard’s doesn’t have to exist, merely be convincingly enough described so that it might be a real place. I was certainly convinced.’
‘So who gets murdered?’
‘Jake Muscat, the club owner, of course. He’s found – by the startled cigarette girl on the dust jacket – shot dead in the course of a robbery.’
‘Really? How dramatic.’
‘Oh, it was. Evadne doesn’t hold back on the gruesome details like some do. Muscat takes a bullet to the back of the head and there’s blood and bits everywhere. No wonder Sapphire screams the house down.’
‘Sapphire?’
‘The cigarette girl who finds the body. Do try and keep up.’
‘Where does she find it?’
‘In Muscat’s office. He’d been putting the nightly takings away and had the office safe open when the thief appears to rob him.’
‘Shoots him and then robs him?’
‘That’s what it looks like. There was a pistol in the safe. Muscat called it his insurance policy, but it didn’t pay out that night. He must have heard the intruder and reached for it.’
‘But wasn’t quite quick enough on the draw,’ said Campion quietly. ‘How did the killer get into the office? I’m assuming this is late at night or early in the morning if the owner’s cashing up.’
‘I haven’t got to that bit yet,’ admitted Amanda, ‘but I’m sure Evadne’s got a credible explanation. She’s very good that way, even with her red herrings. One thing would amuse you.’
‘Only one?’
‘Early on in the story, there’s a minor character – a very minor character – wearing big round glasses and a fedora who turns up driving a left-hand-drive, olive-green Ford V8 coupé. Ring any bells?’
‘Good heavens! That’s the car I had at the start of the war. It was an American roadster donated to the War Office by a friendly official at the American Embassy, and we had few of those back then. Good little car; in fact, I drove it when I visited Evadne Childe at her home in Essex back in 1940.’
‘And she remembered it, both you and the car. I told you she was good at her research.’
‘Do you mind if I test that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Does she go into detail about the pistol in Jake Muscat’s safe?’
‘You don’t think women know anything about guns, is that it?’
‘I was merely interested in how much research she did on the subject.’
‘I’ll have to get the book.’
As Amanda disappeared into the bedroom, Campion hurried to the police file he had hidden under the cushion of his armchair, consulted it and replaced it, returning to the breakfast table just as his wife came back, flicking through the pages of The Bottle Party Murders.
‘The gun in the safe was a Smith & Wesson .38 calibre revolver,’ Amanda read aloud, ‘sometimes referred to as the 200 British Service version because it could take the 200-grain British service round – whatever that is – as manufactured for us by the Americans in 1940.’
‘That’s very impressive,’ said Mr Campion, while thinking: And absolutely correct.
The London office of J.P. Gilpin & Co, a converted four-storey mews house off Bedford Place, smelled as a traditional publisher’s should – of old leather, beeswax polish and bookbinder’s glue. Or perhaps, thought Mr Campion, that was just his imagination working overtime. The dominant colour scheme was of light oak brown, which extended to wallpaper, paint and carpets, and visitors to the firm were confronted – rather than greeted – by an impressive Victorian stand-up desk, at which one just knew that the chairman, or a designated relative, would ceremonially open the post each morning and afternoon. It was not beyond the bounds of fancy that a ceremonial sword or a bayonet last used at Corunna would be employed to slice open the larger envelopes or parcels of books, but as Albert and Amanda’s arrival followed well in the wake of the morning postman, they were greeted by the slightly less daunting figure of a diminutive lady of a certain age bristling behind steel-rimmed spectacles and brandishing a notebook as a shield and a pencil sharpened to a lethal point as a sword.
‘My name is Miss Prim,’ she said in a rolling Scots accent.
‘I’ll bet it is,’ said Mr Campion sotto voce, and received a swift wifely kick on the ankle for his impudence.
The Campions had walked from the Bottle Street flat via Oxford Street, having left Rupert once more in the care of his guardian angel (if angels came in the size and with the temperament of hungry brown bears), Lugg, who suggested that he distract the lad with a stroll down through Green Park. Now that the Victory Parade crowds had dispersed – ‘Some must ’ave ’omes to go to’ – it would be a chance to show Rupert Buckingham Palace and some red-coated guardsmen behaving like proper soldiers. That way the youngster would not have to see the bomb damage which still scarred much of the West End.
Mr Campion agreed with the plan immediately, on condition that Lugg did not fill Rupert’s head with seditious, and completely fanciful, notions that ‘One day all this will be yours’. He knew full well that Lugg had an ulterior motive for avoiding the Bedford Square area: during the Blitz of 1941 he had, as part of a Heavy Rescue squad, been involved in clearing the site of the Jewish Girls’ Club on Alfred Place, which had been destroyed in a bombing raid with considerable loss of life. It had been an experience the big man longed to forget.
Amanda, a wartime bride and mother, had been forcibly relocated out of London by her husband, but remembered the early air raids which had hit the length of Oxford Street from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road, damaging some landmark retail emporia. Selfridges, hit on several occasions, had lost its famous roof garden and Palm Court restaurant but, though disrupted, continued to trade throughout the war; she had read that its impressive internal lifts had been restored to working order the previous year. As she reminisced about peacetime afternoon teas and the delights of the famous Food Hall, her husband smiled but remained silent as he was still, by official decree, forbidden to tell even his wife of his regular dealings during the war with the Selfridge Annex, which had served as a hub for joint activities by British and American intelligence services.
Further along Oxford Street, the devastated John Lewis store remained a bomb site, its jagged remains reminding one journalist of ‘the ruins of a Greek temple’. Even the lightest of breezes would result in a film of brick and concrete dust covering the street until rain washed it away as a grey slurry, but Amanda found the most heart-wrenching sight to be the children, mostly rough boys aged around nine or ten, who scoured the ruins and the gutters for ‘dumpers’ – discarded cigarette butts, which they collected in old tobacco tins. If questioned by a policeman – or indeed any adult – about this activity, they would respond pugnaciously that they were doing it for a father or an elder brother, but Campion knew a good proportion of them would already be hardened smokers, carrying boxes of matches containing wads of cotton wool so the matches did not rattle and give away their habit.
This was Mayfair, thought Amanda, and yet she was seeing scenes which Pathé News could have brought her fresh from a German city on which the Blitz had been repaid with interest, and the dust, dirt and cracked, uneven pavements would have played havoc with a pair of decent shoes. Bomb craters had been colonized by brambles, which at least offered the prospect of a blackberry harvest, a much-prized treat for a population of foragers. Suddenly the spoils of victory seemed rather thin.
But that was churlish, she chided herself. We are at peace, and life will return to normal. Her husband, her son and their closest friends had survived and, though Britain may be changing, it was still Britain, perhaps no longer the ruler of the high seas or even the great imperial powerhouse it had once been, but still British through and through. Which meant that normality would soon be restored.
And for her husband, Albert Campion, clambering over building rubble to get to a publisher’s office to investigate the connection between a detective story written by a woman with whom he shared a godmother, and a real-life clubland murder; well, that was fairly normal, wasn’t it?
Cheered by the thought, Amanda took command when her husband was confronted by Miss Prim. She had never once thought of Mr Campion as ox-like or at all bullish, but she knew a red rag when she saw one.
‘I am Lady Amanda Fitton,’ she said with crystal clarity, ‘and I would like to speak to a person of consequence about one of your recent novels, The Bottle Party Murders. I think you call them editors. Is one available?’
FIVE
Editorial
Amanda may have been unsure of the operational hierarchy of publishing, but Veronica Hatherall, being a devotee of the society columns (one never knew who had a bestselling scandalous autobiography in them), was well aware of Lady Amanda, one of the sisters of the Earl of Pontisbright, and, like herself, an independently minded woman with a career rather than just a husband.
Admittedly, Veronica’s chosen path diverged somewhat from Amanda’s foray into aeronautical engineering, as it was not uncommon to find women in key positions – though rarely on the board – in publishing firms. For the general run of tasks involved in producing a piece of fiction, the mothering and cosseting of outrageously sensitive authors was seen as essential and the female touch vital, as well as cost-effective. Female employees were loyal, many of them clinging to the belief that publishing was a respectable occupation, especially when their mothers (with whom they lived) thought so too. They were obviously cheaper to run than men and their lunches with authors rarely lasted more than three hours.
During the war years, Veronica had progressed from publisher’s representative (itself an advancement on her first position as copy typist) to proof-reader, to copy editor to commissioning editor. It was, she realized, perhaps as high as she could hope to rise within the Gilpin empire, for all above her who were resplendent with titles such as Publisher or Editorial Director (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Educational), were, to a man, men. But her advantage – her trump card in the game of inter-office jockeying – was her long working relationship with Evadne Childe, an author whom the American office classed as ‘a banker’, and the London end of the firm referred to formally as ‘a major asset’ and, informally, in the safety of the cocktail bars of Bloomsbury, as their ‘cash cow’.
Gilpin’s bestselling author had insisted on dealing with Veronica Hatherall, and only Veronica Hatherall, throughout the war, her demand underscored by the threat that the alternative might be that Evadne would seek representation by a literary agent, who would take control of the translation, film and subsidiary rights to her work out of the hands of Gilpin’s. Given that such a situation was the subject of the worst nightmares of the board members of J.P. Gilpin, Veronica’s position, while probably static, was certainly secure.
By default of being female, one of Veronica’s duties was to be the second line of the firm’s defence should an unwanted visitor arrive without an appointment and somehow succeed in overrunning Gilpin’s first line of defence, the steely Miss Prim. Almost invariably, such intruders into the inner sanctum were would-be authors, charmingly nervous young spinsters or boisterous, overconfident young men, demanding to know if the manuscript they had submitted several weeks before had been read yet, or indeed opened. Veronica had especially vivid memories, and the occasional nightmare, of a demure, sweetly spoken Froebel nanny, who had carried a brown paper parcel tied up with string into Gilpin’s and, once she was seated in Veronica’s shoebox of an office, claimed that it contained, ‘Seventy-five thousand words of deathless prose, but nobody will publish it!’ While this was hardly the most encouraging sales pitch, it was the nanny’s subsequent behaviour which lingered in Veronica’s mind, and in the mythology of the company.
