No 'music'. Were they in a public place? Not talking to her husband, but about him to another. A lover?
'She made one great mistake… She married an Oriental.' A piece of hindsight, this one, uttered by whom, a judge, a lawyer, a biographer?
'She married an Oriental.' The language was pompous. Old. Victorian, perhaps? It was impossible to tell.
'Entitled to kill…' This had to be advice from a judge, a bit of a lecture after the conclusion of a case. It was no good, though, he had nothing more. He turned to the poetry, not his strong point, to say the least. The verse had to be tied to the quotes, but how? The ghosts of society. Outraged society. Above him, the station announcements burbled incomprehensibly, blurring echoes. Indistinct people rushed past. A train was pulling out.
Could this female victim have been a lady of society? Speeches, weddings, hosts, toasts. She hadn't wanted any music. She was upset by her husband's threat. 'A person who honestly believes that his life is in danger is entitled to kill his assailant.' But it was a woman whose life had been in danger. So she hadn't been the victim, she had been the murderess, and she had been acquitted; she had honestly believed her life to be in danger. 'My husband has threatened to kill me…'
A society murder case, an act of violence that had possibly been committed in public. There had to be something more. Who had made the quotes, who had authored the poem? He started with the latter, speaking it aloud. An elderly woman standing nearby gave him a filthy stare and moved away.
It sounded like more of a song than a poem. A touch of iambic pentameter. There was an air of familiar jauntiness. Vince rose and crossed the concourse to the station bookshop, hoping to find something, anything that might point him in the right direction. He checked the time, 7:12 p.m.
He had no idea where to start in the small poetry section, so he turned to the crime books instead, and began checking the shelves.
True Crime and Criminals. Famous Cases of the Old Bailey… Great Crimes of the Twentieth Century.
He could hardly start buying books indiscriminately. He only had a few pounds in his pocket, and his current account was so empty that his cashcard would be no help, so he was forced to thumb through each volume looking for clues. A shop assistant with a face like an unpopular root vegetable stood watching with his arms folded, ready to weed out browsers. The shop was waiting to close. The Murder Club Guide to London. The Trials of Marshall Hall. The Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder… Ghosts of the City.
He had barely started thumbing through the indices when the assistant shuffled over to the entrance and pulled a steel shutter down with a bang.
It was impossible. He suddenly saw how difficult it would be uncovering information in the city after dark. There were no other bookstores likely to be open now, and most libraries would soon be closing their doors. One solution presented itself; he could gain access to the Internet. Sebastian had said nothing in the charter about that. He needed to find one of the cyber-cafés dotting the city like electronic beacons, and run some information searches. The man at the station information counter was mystified by his request, but the young girl refilling the brochure holders was not, and directed him to a street behind the coach station where a smart new cafeteria called Blutopia waited beneath a sign of flickering cobalt neon.
He wiped the rain from the scuffed sleeves of his black nylon jacket, purchased a coffee and threaded his way between shining aluminium tables to a free monitor with an up-and-running search engine.
How could he run a search without something specific to look for? The wording in the clue was so vague as to be useless. He could imagine how many thousands of matches a word like 'oriental' or 'society' would generate. He tried longer phrases, and finding no correspondents, entered the True Crime titles he had been prevented from perusing in the station bookstore, starting with 'Old Bailey', then weeding the information down to 'murder trials', but there were still so many that he knew it would take several hours to go through them all. He wanted to call Louie and ask his help, even though his esoteric knowledge extended no further than episode titles of obscure science fiction shows.
An extraordinary feeling of isolation had settled over him, a sense of secret urgency that no one who met his eyes would understand. He wondered if any of the other patrons seated around him harboured mysteries, but they mostly looked like the usual net-heads, filling up the hours of a dull, rainy winter evening.
Abandoning 'Old Bailey', he tried the title of another book he had seen in the store, 'The Trials of Marshall Hall' and was rewarded with an entry for the legendary Victorian lawyer. Almost without thinking, he opened it. The page was part of a bookstore's mail-order service. Under a heading marked 'Society's Greatest Scandals' he found the answer to his question – or at least, to part of it.
It appeared to be a chapter title from the book he had seen: 'She made the greatest mistake a woman of the West can make. She married an Oriental.' Below the caption was a photograph of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, defence lawyer for someone called Madame Marie-Marguerite Fahhim, a high-society Parisian beauty accused of shooting her Egyptian husband, Prince Ali Kamel Fahhim Bey, dead in 1923. A cause-célèbre, said the text, the greatest London scandal of the age. She was found innocent, provoked beyond endurance by the Prince's sexual habits and casual cruelties. But there was also a powerful undercurrent of racism here, just the sort of thing Sebastian and his pals would have taken delight in. The page of clues beside the console had finally disintegrated into a rough pale ash. He read on, scrolling down the page.
The Egyptian government had cabled the Attorney-General to complain of derogatory remarks made about 'Orientals' during the trial. And the remark about not wanting music, it was made by Madame Fahhim to the bandleader of the Savoy, where they had a suite.
Where the murder had taken place.
And now the poem suddenly made sense, if one assumed that it owed its rumpty-tumpty style to someone with a strong Savoy connection, someone like W.S. Gilbert. But these were no lyrics for his composer, Sir Arthur Sullivan – or if they were, Vince was unfamiliar with them. As a child he had alarmed his mother by learning all the words to HMS Pinafore and singing them loudly in the bath when he should have been belting out the lyrics to current Top Ten hits like normal children. The poem had the feeling of an early Savoy song, as though from a simpler time. He ran a search on 'Gilbert and Sullivan' and connected through to their archive pages.
The stanza was contained in something called the Bab Ballads, a short anthology of verse penned by W.S. Gilbert and published before the duo went onto create their operas. The Savoy Operas, pretty, passionless pieces inspired by the extraordinary success of Jacques Offenbach, one of Sebastian's favourite composers.
Vince had twenty minutes left in which to reach the Savoy Hotel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BUT OF course, they would never let him in. Not to any part of the hotel beyond the lobby, at any rate. He should have changed, worn something a bit more adaptable, but there had been no time.
How, then, to start? He approached the gleaming Rolls-Royce frontage of the Savoy with trepidation. It was a trick, of course, to make him feel aware of his station in life, to make him feel small. And it was working. Standing there in the chill air with a mist spilling in from the Embankment, he felt out of place, insignificant in his torn damp jeans and nylon padded jacket. Couples appeared before him in evening dress, drifting through the bronzed revolving doors into the night. Japanese, French and Italian conversations surrounded him, bossy Home-Counties' accents, the clipped tones of Henley gels, the Essex argy-bargy of bullish businessmen, every kind of voice except his own. He did not belong there. He belonged back in Peckham, in his mother's divided semi with its babies and aunts, with the blaring radio in the kitchen and the unrepaired motorbike in the hall.