A carefully enunciating voice answered, a male voice which managed, though remaining impeccably correct, to convey suspicion, disapproval and surprise that a gentleman should be calling at that hour. Miss Mathilda was not at home and, no, he was not at liberty to tell Joe when she was expected to return. Joe left a message that she was to contact him at the Ritz as soon as she was able. The voice took on several more degrees of frost and assured him that the message would be passed at the earliest convenient moment. Joe was left in no possible doubt that this moment might arise round about teatime the next day.
Hastily doing up his tie, grabbing his Gladstone bag and picking up an old police cloak he kept behind the door, he ran down the stairs to the taxi stand on the Embankment.
The Ritz was wearing its usual air of dignified calm. The street lamps under the arcade swung gently to and fro and were reflected from the wet pavement. The foyer lighting was discreet and taxis were standing by; various parties were just breaking up amidst bibulous faces, female laughter and male guffaws, flirtatious farewells. Evidently the news had yet to break but somewhere in that refined interior lay the body of a distinguished public figure, ‘bludgeoned to death’ as Sir Nevil had put it.
Such was the efficiency with which the Ritz closed ranks, the atmosphere was entirely normal. Staff were at their posts or moving at an unruffled pace. The night receptionist, outwardly calm, was, however, Joe judged, secretly a-quiver, both awed and delighted by his responsibility. Joe advanced on the desk. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said, keeping his voice low, ‘I could claim to have an appointment with Dame Beatrice Jagow-Joliffe. Here’s my card.’
The Ritz smelled strongly of fitted carpet with a faint overlay of scent and cigars and somewhere in the background — but discreetly a long way in the background — expensive food. The receptionist crooked a finger and summoned a page boy and he led Joe to the gilded cage of a lift. They got out at the fourth floor and stepped into a silent corridor. A figure posted by the fourth door along acknowledged them with a nod and Joe dismissed the page boy, to his grave disappointment. As Joe approached he noticed that the door of Room 4 stood a fraction open and lights were on inside.
Joe guessed that the guard was part of the hotel security staff. The tall, slim figure, the smart black coat and striped trousers were at odds with the severe police face. Joe looked at him and looked again, encountering a jaw dropped in disbelief, disbelief which rapidly turned to happy recognition. It was a face last seen leaving the mud and misery of a French battlefield on a stretcher.
‘Just a moment,’ Joe said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’
‘Yessir. Detective Sergeant Armitage, sir. With the Met. Was Sergeant Armitage, C Company when we last met.’
‘That’s right! Cambrai, Bill?’
‘Cambrai it was, sir. And if I may say so, sir, you look a good deal smarter now than you did when I last saw you,’ he added, eyeing Joe’s dinner-jacketed elegance.
‘I could say the same, Bill,’ said Joe. ‘We were none of us looking too sharp then. But I’m really glad you got out of that all right. We must have a talk and a pint. But in the meantime perhaps you can tell me what’s been going on here?’
‘Murder, sir, is what’s been going on here.’
‘Perhaps we should view the body? Take a look at the crime scene?’
Armitage led Joe through into a small lobby. Three closed doors faced them. Joe opened the door on the right and stepped into an opulent Ritz bedroom. The furnishings reflected the taste of the court of Louis XVI as perceived by Waring and Gillow of Tottenham Court Road. The main illumination was supplied by a chandelier; bedside lights were in the manner of Pompeii. The carpet was the best that Wilton had to offer and each of the two bedside tables carried a cargo of carafe, biscuit barrel and ashtray. A voice tube was clipped to the wall. There seemed to be something missing.
‘I see no body,’ said Joe.
‘Next door, sir. Next door,’ said Armitage. ‘This is the Marie Antoinette suite and it has a separate sitting room. That’s the door on the left — there’s a private bathroom between the two.’
He stood back as Joe stepped into the sitting room.
The first impression that hit Joe was the unmistakable metallic smell of freshly spilled blood. He realized he must have made an involuntary movement of revulsion as Armitage stepped forward and put an arm under his elbow murmuring, ‘Steady, sir. I should have warned you. .’
‘That’s all right, Bill. We’ve seen worse.’
And on the battlefield they had, but this small room with its pastel walls, its gilt, its brocades, seemed to Joe to be frozen in horror and reverberating still with echoes of the murderous violence which had so recently erupted in its calm interior. The eighteenth-century elegance threw into shocking relief the chaotic scene before him. The walls were spattered with a rich tapestry of blood and at the centre of the spray, in front of the marble fireplace, lay a sprawled corpse, its head battered and resting in a pool of thickening blood.
‘Definitely dead by the time I got here, sir. First thing I did was check her wrist for a pulse. A gonner. But not long gone. I touched nothing else, of course.’
Joe stood in the doorway looking, absorbing, noting. A Louis XVI sofa remained upright but its companion chair had been overturned. An arrangement of white lilies on a spindle-legged table in a corner, incongruously still upright and intact, was dappled with a surreal maculation. The room’s only window, a casement, stood broken and half open, hanging into the room. Shards of glass littered the carpet.
A cough to Joe’s right attracted his attention. A boy dressed in the Ritz uniform was standing in the corner as far away from the corpse as possible. Tense and embarrassed, he had been set there by Armitage to guard or perhaps even to restrain a girl who was sitting resentfully in a chair. A pretty girl angrily smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder.
‘Ah, yes! Here’s someone you ought to meet, sir,’ said Armitage with a trace of satisfaction in his voice, waving a hand towards the girl. ‘Our prime exhibit and, for want of a better, our prime suspect, as it happens!’
The girl flashed him a scornful look and took a drag through narrowed eyes at her cigarette. She puffed out smoke in the general direction of her guard who coughed again and, obviously uneasy with his role, looked for support or release to Armitage.
‘All right, Robert, lad, you can stand down now,’ said Armitage, dismissing him.
The girl shrugged her slim shoulders and jumped to her feet. She was wearing an evening dress of some pale grey silky fabric done up fashionably low on the hips with a silver belt. Silently Joe noted the bloodstains on the hem of her skirt just below her left knee.
She glared at Joe. ‘Can it possibly take thirty-five minutes to get here from Chelsea?’ she asked.
‘Good evening, Westhorpe,’ said Joe. ‘Perhaps you could explain what the devil you’re doing here? Not only what you’re doing here but how you come to be covered in gore and, as I believe, standing over a recently murdered Dame of the British Empire? I’m sure there’s some perfectly logical explanation but I would be glad to hear what it is.’
‘Do you know this young person?’ said Armitage, disappointed and mistrustful.
‘Yes, I do. This is Constable Westhorpe. She’s one of us. WPC number 142 — in, er, plain clothes — but I still want to know what she’s doing here.’
‘Are you taking a statement, sir? Because, if so, I would welcome the opportunity to correct the over-coloured assertions you have just made. I am neither covered in gore, nor am I standing over the body. The stains you have noted were acquired when, on discovering the body of Dame Beatrice, I knelt by her side to check for signs of life. I didn’t touch her — she was quite obviously dead.’