Pity, because they were nice hands, with just the right amount of crisp, dark hairs on the back, and she’d pictured them tooling, stamping, making intricate mosaics of metal and leather. Perhaps, in his painstaking artisan mind, magazine illustrators came in on a level with doodlers?
‘Also, our Parisian friend helped himself to a whole pile of Bubbles’ jewels in, quote, payment for services rendered, unquote. He derided Catspaw’s cartoons in the press, got Marriot to underwrite an enterprise that didn’t exist – this must go no further, please – he also got Kitty Gardener pregnant. That’s the reason she zipped off to Zurich in the spring.’
‘Not a poster designer’s convention, then?’
‘There’s a clinic that deals with these things-’
She didn’t dare ask how he knew.
‘- and it’s common knowledge that Lulu was engaged to friend-Louis until she found him in bed with Bubbles, and you know how passionately Biff feels about his sister’s honour. Damn,’ he added lightly, ‘if the list ain’t just about endless.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting someone else with a grudge against Boucard?’ Fizzy asked as they reached the steps of the Cellar.
‘Someone, for instance, like you?’
Ahead of them, Orville was tipping the doorman and Chilton was checking in his boater, but Teddy remained behind on the steps.
‘You don’t say.’
‘Oh, but I do say.’ Suddenly the sunshine seemed terribly bright. ‘I don’t know where you gathered your gossip from -’
‘Information,’ he corrected mildly. ‘We called it information in the Intelligence.’ Adding, in response to her involuntary raising of eyebrows, ‘There was a lot to sort out after the Armistice.’
The hundreds, no thousands, of atrocities committed after the surrender flashed through her mind as it occurred to her that maybe that’s what inspired soldiers to become bookbinders. Intricate, absorbing, it makes one forget.
She coughed. ‘Anyway, don’t think I don’t know that Louis got your kid brother hooked on a certain white powdery substance.’
And him only sixteen, poor sap.
‘I see,’ Teddy said slowly. ‘So which do you have me pegged for? The puncture wound, the blunt object or both?’
Fizzy took a step back up the stairs to meet him square in the eye.
‘Louis Boucard,’ she said stiffly, ‘was a man with neither scruples nor conscience, but reasons to hate aren’t motives for murder, and even if they were, then the killer would surely choose somewhere more private, wouldn’t they, where they’re more likely to get away with it?’
‘Ah, but they are going to get away with it,’ Teddy replied softly, holding her miscoloured gaze. ‘Aren’t they?’
Down in the Jazz Cellar, it looked like a tornado had swept through the place, with the contents of handbags and pockets spilling over every table and chair as the police searched everyone who’d been in the gallery in an effort to find the missing portrait of a young woman wearing nothing but a painted Venetian mask. The sombre mood quickly gave way to hilarity as photographs fell out of wallets showing girls who were definitely not the title-holders’ wives along with two cream buns discovered in the kitbag of a woman who constantly bored people rigid with tales of her regimented diet. But no paintings of women in masks!
Having been officially declared a Snitched-Portrait-Free Zone, Fizzy found a sudden need to sit down. As shaking hands slotted a cigarette in its holder, she found herself met with the usual click of a dozen offers for light and one noticeable absence.
‘I say, Fizzy, are you free for the opera on Saturday?’ Biff wanted to know. ‘Well, how about the Saturday after?’
‘Tough luck, old man,’ Marriott cut in, ‘because I’ve already got my offer in for a spin down to the seaside in the old jalopy. What d’you say, old girl? Are you up for it?’
‘Excuse me.’
She had to pass Teddy to reach the powder room, but managed to do it without meeting his eye, though suddenly, there seemed to be something wrong with her breathing. Just not enough air in the club. Once inside the pink painted sanctuary, she sank against the door, the feathers on her white silk cloche hat fluttering with each tremble that she gave.
‘Goodness, darling.’
Gloria, a vision in her customary cream silk, stopped abruptly from the business of applying lipstick to her perfect pout.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
A hundred ghosts, Fizzy thought, recalling laughter, first jobs, second babies. Telegrams.
Her legs felt like they’d been filleted. There was no blood in her veins. None at all.
‘That gust of wind gave it away,’ she said quietly.
The lipstick in Gloria’s hand faltered, but only momentarily.
‘In all the years I’ve known you,’ Fizzy continued, ‘you’ve always worn wide-brimmed hats, Gloria, but the one thing they need that a cloche doesn’t is a hat pin.’
Not an ice pick.
Louis Boucard was killed with a hatpin.
‘And when the wind took yours down the street, I knew.’
As did Teddy Hardcastle.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I presume it was because of your affair?’
Gloria swallowed. ‘I went into that with my eyes wide open, darling, because whatever other faults Louis might have had, he…well, let’s just say he didn’t have them in the bedroom department.’
Fizzy felt it best to let that one pass.
‘But he used you as a subject?’
That was his great ‘Revelation’ – and what greater dynamite for an advertising campaign than the wife of a respected politician on public display?
‘Like the press said, he only ever paints nudes,’ Gloria said ruefully. ‘But the treachery is that he painted me while I slept. I hadn’t an inkling until he started blackmailing me. He was always in arrears with the bookies.’
‘He wanted more, I suppose?’
‘No.’
Gloria fixed her perpetually sad eyes on her friend.
‘Orville’s positively swimming in lolly and quite frankly the amount I was paying Louis, Orville didn’t even notice. Another frock, another hat – he didn’t question it. No, the trouble started once people began to appreciate the genius of Louis’s work. You see, the two things my lover wanted most in life were to be rich and famous, and that’s when he decided to unveil his masterpiece. To propel himself into the limelight.’
She drew herself up to her full height.
‘Me, I could have ridden the storm, I’ve ridden worse, and the girls are too young to understand. But Orville, darling – Orville’s a good man, and to see him publicly humiliated as a cuckold…Well, he’d have stood by me, no question, but the scandal would have destroyed him. I couldn’t let Louis do that.’
‘So you did the only decent thing? Stabbed him with your hat pin?’
What little colour was left drained from Gloria’s face at the sharpness of her friend’s tone.
‘It wasn’t what I intended, believe me. The idea was to sneak in and steal the horrid thing, but when I slipped into the back room, he was collapsed over his precious cocaine and -’ She made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘Typical Louis. Never did know when to stop.’
‘Why kill him, Gloria?’
‘Why not, darling? If you’d only seen Kitty after she got back from Switzerland! The doctors say she’ll never be able to have another baby, did you know that? And then there’s Foxy. Five hundred pounds, can you imagine? He’d ruined poor Lulu, was blackmailing Bubbles, had said terrible things about Catspaw, so I thought, what the hell.’
Gloria pointed to a spot on the back of her elegant swan neck.
‘I read that if you go right between the vertebrae it severs the spinal cord. He was out cold, Fizzy. I swear he never felt a thing, and if you ask me do I regret it, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say it was no worse than putting a rabid dog down.’