He accepted a large book from the formidable barmaid, scanned the day’s entries and asked me my name. He inscribed it and said, ‘One o’clock, sir, please, and your place reserved only until one-fifteen. We are popular, you see.’ I picked up my sherry, which the barmaid had covered with a clean beermat and turned to see a young woman standing behind me. ‘This is the lady writer. Mr Stratford, miss. Miss Parkstone, sir,’ said the waiter.
‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Imogen!’
‘Good gracious me!’ said the girl. ‘William, put Mr Stratford at my table if he is staying for lunch.’
‘What will you drink?’ I asked.
‘My usual, please, Mabel.’
‘If you like to upset your liver, it’s no business of mine,’ said the barmaid. ‘This gentleman had more sense.’ She juggled with bottles and a shaker. We took our drinks into the lounge and seated ourselves in armchairs beneath a particularly fine set of antlers.
‘So it was you,’ I said. ‘How came you to be serving in a dress shop — viz., to wit, Trends?’
‘To get material for a book, of course. I got the idea from P.G. Wodehouse. Do you remember Rosie M. Banks?’
‘Oh, the female novelist who worked as a waitress in a gentlemen’s club to get material for Mervyn Keene, Clubman?’
‘Exactly. Well, it struck me as such a good idea that I thought I would try it.’
‘Monica Dickens tried it, and with signal success. This place rather brings Dickens to mind, don’t you think? Of course, Monica’s accounts of her experiences were autobiographical.’
‘Don’t deviate. What’s all this about Trends? What were you doing among the ladies’ dresses? I didn’t know you were married.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Oho!’
‘And not “Oho” either. I am now an amateur detective. I was merely sleuthing at Trends. I was looking for traces of Gloria Mundy.’
‘That woman whose body was found in the ashes of a bonfire? How on earth did you get mixed up in that awful business?’
‘Never mind that for the moment. It’s a long story and it will keep. Let’s talk about you. I nearly dropped dead when the woman at the post-office at Culvert Green had a forwarding address for Parkstone. I thought coincidence was playing even more of a joke than usual.’
‘I called myself Domremy at Trends, but I thought I had better come clean in the hotel register and at the post-office.’
‘Just as well to avoid unnecessary complications.’ I looked at her as the autumn sun brightened that otherwise depressing room and made gold lights in her fine-spun, dark-brown hair.
‘Why aren’t you pale and interesting?’ I demanded. ‘I was told that you had a whiter-than-white face, black hair, and cats’ eyes like green glass when you were at Trends.’
‘They were thinking of somebody else. Anyway, Trends wasn’t the only stint I did in subservience to my art. I’ve worked in old-clothes shops in the East End, in men’s outfitters in the suburbs, in so-called salons in the provinces where they put one silk scarf and one Italian sweater in the window and sell trousers nobody would be seen dead in. I have even worked at an Irish draper’s where the bar behind the shop was a lot bigger than the shop itself and far better patronised. That was over in the Republic. Besides all that, I’ve worked in Kensington High Street, in Oxford Street and (by virtue of knowing the management) in the clothing section of a Marks and Sparks. You name it, I’ve done it, so far as the sales side of the rag trade is concerned.’
‘God bless my soul!’
‘Keep on asking and perhaps He will.’
‘It seems a lot of trouble to have gone to for a single book. That’s what I meant,’ I said.
‘Ah, but what a book it’s going to be! This is not a Rosie M. Banks, I’ll tell you. I’ve had a hell of a time, sometimes hilarious, sometimes very unpleasant — occasionally, when walking home alone after dark in some parts of London, even quite dangerous — but I’m sure it will be worth it. I plan a monumental opus after the style of Dostoievsky. I ended up at Trends, packed the job in — couldn’t stand the boss-lady for one thing — left my hotel and came to stay in this town with my sister and write the book. If you’d paid your sub to the lit. soc. as a gentleman should, and kept in with the rest of the crowd, you would have known I’d moved out of London.’
The gong went and we adjourned for lunch. The dining-room was full and, except for one mixed party at a central table which seated eight, all the guests except Imogen were men.
‘I always try to pick a place which caters mostly for men,’ she said, when we were seated, ‘then I know I’m going to get enough to eat.’
‘I always used to think you were on a perpetual diet. That’s one reason why old Hara-kiri mistook you for Gloria when he took his wife to buy a dress at Trends.’
‘I was called Gloria at Trends. Not my choice, needless to say. I inherited the name from my predecessor. As to my physique, I suppose I’m a fausse maigre like that girl in a novel by (I think) W.J. Locke. She looked like a starved cat in her clothes, but peeled to a goddess when she put on her swimsuit.’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Splendid! When do I — ?’
‘No lechery, please. I am convent bred,’ she said, laughing. ‘Now tell me your story.’
‘Not here and not now. I intend to do full justice to this meal. Game soup and Southdown lamb — the local produce, I trust — don’t go with murder and arson, so let me have my lunch and then you shall walk me round the town and I’ll tell you all. Remind me, though, to send a telegram before we begin our peregrinations. I’ve got to scrub the false information I enclosed in a letter to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.’
‘Goodness me, you are flying high! Do you really write informative letters to Dame Beatrice? I met her once when she lectured to the lit. soc. on Macbeth.’
‘I missed that. Yes, we are fellow sleuths. Get on with your soup or it will be cold. Everything shall be revealed when we are up on the Downs this afternoon.’
But I decided that it would be sacrilege to talk about burnt corpses while we were walking on the Downs so, as soon as I had sent off my telegram to the Stone House, I told Imogen all that I knew about Gloria Mundy as we explored the town.
We walked up the slope to the castle gatehouse and, as we were looking at what had been the outer bailey I said, ‘I knew old Hara-kiri was mistaken.’
‘About what?’
‘He thought you were the ghost of Gloria Mundy.’
‘Who is Hara-kiri?’
‘Do you remember a vast man with a lot of yellow hair? I brought him to one of the lit. soc. dinners when my first book was published.’
‘The man I called the Viking?’
‘That’s the chap.’
‘But how could he have thought I was Gloria Mundy’s ghost? That’s the one and only time I ever saw him.’
‘No. You saw him a few days ago in the Trends shop. He came with his wife to look at evening dresses.’
‘But, Corin, I wasn’t at Trends a few days ago. I left there weeks ago. That’s why you didn’t find me at that rather awful little guest-house. I was at Trends on a month’s approbation and I left at the end of that month. I had got what I wanted and they had had enough of me. Don’t look so moonstruck. Does it matter?’
‘No. I suppose not. Strange, though, that the light-haired girl I spoke to thought I meant you and not Gloria Mundy.’
‘I expect you asked for Gloria. We all had special names in that department. The light-haired girl you mentioned, and anybody who succeeded her in the job, was called Dorella. My number was five and all the fives would be known as Gloria and all the fours as Dorella and the third is always called Violetta and so on and so forth. Just an old Spanish custom at that particular shop.’