I waited patiently, leaning on the door frame until they hustled off towards the staircase, still shrugging themselves into their heavy winter coats.
I felt more than a little sorry for them. Goodness knows what fantasies were running through their heads. Each of them, most likely, was praying that she had been chosen to replace Phyllis Wyvern in the leading role.
I’d better get to work. They’d be back soon enough—and angry at my deception.
I stepped into their room and turned the key, which, like most keys at Buckshaw, was left in the room side of the lock.
Across the room, on the inside wall between the window and the dresser, was a hanging curtain—a leftover from the days when guest bedrooms were decorated like Turkish harems. It pictured a hunting party with elephants, and a tiger, unseen among the jungle trees, preparing to spring.
I jerked the tapestry aside, sneezing at the cloud of gray dust that flew up into the room, revealing a small, wood-paneled door. I inserted the key and, to my immense satisfaction, felt the bolt slide back with a welcome click.
I took hold of the knob and gave it a good twist. Again there were promising sounds but the door was stuck fast.
I muttered something that was half a prayer and half a curse. Even a fraction of a second’s inspection would have shown me that it was painted shut.
Given five minutes in my laboratory, I could have produced a solvent that would strip a battleship while you were saying “Rumpelstiltskin,” but there wasn’t the time.
A quick look round the room revealed a lady’s handbag tossed carelessly on the bed, and I fell upon it like the tiger upon the Maharajahs.
Handkerchief … scent bottle … aspirins … cigarettes (bad girl!), and a small purse which, guessing by its weight and feel, contained no more than six shillings, sixpence.
Ah! Here it was—just what I was looking for. A nail file. Sheffield steel. Perfect!
My prayer had evidently been heard and my curse forgotten.
Inserting the blade of the file between the frame and the door, and working my way round it like a Girl Guide opening rather a large tin of campfire beans, I soon had a satisfactory pile of paint chips on the floor at my feet.
Now for it. One more twist of the knob and a kick at the bottom panel, and the door jerked open with a groan.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the Chamber of Death.
• SIXTEEN •
THIS BEDROOM, TOO, HAD a dusty drapery covering the unused door, and I was forced to fight my way out from behind it before proceeding.
Phyllis Wyvern’s body was still slumped in the chair as I had first found it, but was now covered with a sheet, as if it were a statue whose sculptor had wandered off to lunch.
The police would have finished their inspection by now, and were probably awaiting the arrival of a suitable vehicle in which to carry off the body.
No great harm, then, in having a dekko of my own.
I lifted the sheet slowly, taking care not to disturb her hair, still laced with Juliet’s posies, which seemed to me the only vanity she had left.
Even in death, though, there was something exotic about Phyllis Wyvern, although after twenty-four hours, the body had begun its inevitable chemical dissolution, and had now taken on a gray and waxy appearance.
The awful pallor of her flesh—aside from her made-up face—gave her the appearance of a star from the days of the silent cinema, and for a moment I had the same awful feeling I’d had before: that she was playing the game of Statues, as I used to do with Feely and Daffy before they began to hate me—that in a moment she’d sneeze, or suck in a giant, gasping breath.
But no such thing happened, of course. Phyllis Wyvern was as dead as a door knocker.
I began my examination from the ground up. I lifted the hem of her heavy woolen skirt and saw at once that her ankles were swollen, ballooning out, as it were, above a pair of heavy black work boots.
Work boots? They couldn’t possibly be hers!
Using my handkerchief to guard against fingerprints, I slipped one of the boots off her foot … slowly and carefully, taking special note of the way the thick white stocking was bunched in a knot beneath her instep.
As I had suspected, the boot had been shoved onto her foot after she was dead.
With great care I rolled down the knee-length stocking and removed it. Her foot was puffy, dark, and bruised with the settling blood. Her painted toenails were ghastly.
I replaced the stocking, which slid on easily over her cold flesh.
Getting the boot back on, though, was not as easy as taking it off; the stiffened toes simply refused to slide all the way back into the boot. Could this be rigor mortis?
I pulled it off again and stuck my fingers into the opening. There was something pushed down into the toe—paper, by the feel of it.
Would someone as wealthy and famous as Phyllis Wyvern buy footwear so oversized that she had to stuff paper into the toes to make it fit?
It seemed unlikely. I fished out the wad with my finger and uncrumpled it.
It was a piece of stationery printed at the top with the name: Cora Hotel, Upper Woburn Place, London, WC1.
Scrawled across the page in red ink were the words:
Blast her handwriting (if it was hers). Was it “Must I tell T?”?
The paper was torn from the edge diagonally across the initial—the final letter could have been anything.
D for Desmond? D for Duncan? V for Val? Or was it a B for Bun?
No time to speculate, or even to crow over finding something the police had missed. I shoved the paper into the pocket of my cardigan for later analysis.
I struggled again to replace the boot, but because of the swelling in the legs, it was like trying to squeeze an elephant’s foot into a ballet slipper.
Remembering Flo, or Maeve, or whatever her name was, I dashed back into the adjacent room.
Yes! Just as I thought—the actress had left half a bowl of fruit pieces uneaten on the night table. I helped myself to the dessert spoon and returned to Miss Wyvern.
Using the bowl of the spoon as a shoehorn, I managed to lever the boot back onto her dead foot.
Better check the other one, something told me, and I quickly pried it off. Could there possibly be more of the message in the other toe?
No such luck. To my disappointment the second boot was empty, and I quickly levered it back onto her foot.
So much for the lower extremities.
Next step was to give her a jolly good sniffing. I had learned by experience that poison could underlie all seeming causes of death, and I was taking no chances.
I sniffed her lips (the upper one, I noticed, painted larger than it actually was with scarlet lipstick, perhaps to mask the faint mustache that was visible only at extremely close range), followed by her ears, her nose, her cleavage, her hands, and as much as I could manage of her armpits without actually shifting the body.
Nothing. Except for being dead, Phyllis Wyvern smelled exactly like someone who had, just hours ago, stepped out of a bath of scented salts.
She must have come straight from her performance to her room, removed her Juliet costume (it was still laid out flat on the bed), taken a bath, and then … what?
I used my handkerchief again to collect from the nape of her neck a small sample of the stage makeup I had noted earlier. Smeared onto the white linen, the greasepaint had the appearance of finely ground red brick.
I gave special attention to her fingernails, which had been coated with a shiny scarlet polish to match the lipstick. The cuticles formed stark half-moons of grayish white where the color had not been applied. Feely did her nails in that way, too, and I had a sudden but momentary attack of gooseflesh.
Steady on, old girl, I thought. It’s only death.