This room looked just like the other room, except for the addition of fresh flowers, sprays of the most gorgeous orchids he had ever seen, sitting in a vase on the bedside table. They reminded him he had always come empty-handed. “Someone’s been to see her. Was it her uncle?”
“Oh, no, it was Dr. Nancy brought those. Aren’t they gorgeous? So many shades of red. Brazilian orchids, she said. Ms. Aguilar’s from Brazil, apparently. Dr. Nancy said something from her own country to keep her company.” Nurse Whittey smiled. “That’s just like her. Doctor Nancy, I mean.” She turned to him. “You know Doctor Nancy, don’t you? I believe she mentioned you. I thought myself that perhaps she must be a friend of the patient, but she said, no, just the good friend of a good friend.”
“Yes.” Jury didn’t know what to say.
“Well, I’m just terribly sorry,” Mae Whittey said. She looked down at Lu. “She’s so terribly young.”
Of course, all rules of protocol should have had the nurse leaving, and leaving him alone. Yet they stood there together for some moments in a companionable silence for which Jury was grateful, but which he didn’t understand. Perhaps Nurse Whittey always had that effect on people.
While she made microscopic adjustments to the bedclothes, Jury went to the window and looked out. A view different yet the same. He looked around to see the nurse rearranging the orchids that blazed in the colorless room. Prometheus returning fire to benighted mortals.
He said, “You know, there was a great actress named Dame May Whitty. Same name, spelled differently.” He smiled at her.
“Oh, my, yes. I remember her well. There was that one where she was on a train-yes, and just disappeared, didn’t she?”
“Hitchcock,” said Jury. He looked off through the window that gave out on the same square of land as the one Lu had been in before. “The Lady Vanishes.”
46
Alice Dalyrimple.
How could one take seriously as an escort a woman with such a Victorian name as Alice Dalyrimple?
“Miss Dalyrimple will be your escort.” Alice Dalyrimple, so snobbily intoned by a Miss Crick of the Smart Set escort service. Miss Crick had been entrusted with the appointment book. Melrose felt he had landed in the middle of a Jane Austen novel.
“Now, Mr. Plant, a bit more information. What is your given name?”
Why, wondered Melrose, had he used his last name? Men seeking the services of escort agencies gave out fictional names, surely. At least he could make up a first name: “Algernon. That’s my first name.” From Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde.
“Algernon. Very good.”
Did the name have to meet with her approval?
“Now, we were to decide upon a meeting place.”
His mind ranged over venues, from the Hole in the Wall underneath Waterloo Bridge to Buckingham Palace, where he fantasized presenting Miss Dalyrimple to the queen. In the midst of these unfruitful thoughts, Melrose looked round at the several sluggish old gents in various stages of slumber and said to her, “Boring’s. My club in Mayfair.”
“Oh. And this is permitted by the club, is it?”
Miss Crick’s question was the first indication that they knew Smart Set wasn’t turning up in Burke’s Peerage. It encouraged him to be fulsome: “Oh, my, yes. Yes, we’re quite an open and wide-awake group here.” He decided this after one of the old men snuffled himself out of a coma. The only thing less awake would be the burial vaults in Westminster.
“Yes,” he began, “all she-”
“Miss Dalyrimple?”
Ah! Had he shown bad escort manners in his overly familiar use of “she”? “Miss Dalyrimple need only present herself at the reception desk and they will inform me.”
“I see. You will not be at the door yourself?”
Only if I’m the doorman. “I’ll be in the Members’ Room.”
“And now, could I just verify your credit card number?”
“I believe I gave that to someone already.”
“But not to me.”
Good God, isn’t that what police said when one objected to being asked the same questions over and over? The woman should work for the Met.
“You know, I’d always thought the payment would be made at the end of things.”
“That’s true. But this is just in case, you know.”
In case of what? A heart event in the middle of things? Miss Dalyrimple’s discovering she had walked not into an exclusive club but into a tattoo parlor? London’s being overrun by rivers of rats? He pulled out his wallet and thumbed through his little stash of cards and recited the number. He and Miss Crick then parted.
Now here he sat in the sleepy environs of Boring’s with a book he was trying to force himself to read, waiting for Miss Alice Dalyrimple. They would have dinner here, drinks and then dinner. There was no quieter place to have a conversation about the murders. Surely it would be on her mind, escorts being murdered. How did she know he wasn’t the one? Here these women were, going out with and having sex with potential serial killers, and seemingly careless of it. Had the snarky Miss Crick shown any concern? No. But then, she wasn’t the one going out.
Well, Jury didn’t think the danger was in the escort business itself.
If the women in this kind of work weren’t being murdered because of that work, and if it wasn’t coincidence they happened to be in it-then what did that leave? It meant, didn’t it, they had something else in common-
“My God! If it isn’t Lord Ardry!”
“Colonel Neame.” Melrose got up to shake the hand of the elderly, pink-cheeked former RAF pilot. “I was just wondering if you were around.”
“Always am, dear boy, except for my brief walks to the Ritz and Fortnum’s.”
Ritz for tea, Fortnum & Mason for silk-worsted suits and caviar counter. “Your itinerary must be the envy of London. And this,” Melrose went on, his arm out flung to take in the Members’ Room, “is the only way to live.”
“Well, it’s restful, of course. But I think a bit more animation wouldn’t go unappreciated. My, my!” He was looking toward the entrance to the Members’ Room.
A buxom blonde in a flimsy dress that looked to be made up of chiffon scarves stood at the entrance. The slowly turning fan of bamboo and palm fronds above her set the multiscarved garment in motion. The rest of the motion of bouncy breasts and churning hips was taken care of by the woman herself.
“Who, in God’s name, is this?” The tone was not unappreciative.
This could only be Miss Dalyrimple.
Melrose answered Colonel Neame, “This would be my guest, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Oh ho, my boy! Well done, well done!”
Melrose wanted to tell him he could do it himself, if he’d just yank out a phone directory. If anything could awaken the Rip van Winkles in the room, it was surely Alice Dalyrimple maneuvering herself toward him in her silver sandals.
“Miss Dalyrimple? I’m Algernon Plant.” He caught the colonel’s raised eyebrows.
“How j’ya do?”
Given Miss Crick’s rather hesitant description of her escort, Melrose had formed a cloudy image of a passable imitation of gentility. But Miss Dalyrimple, in her gait and her guise, did nothing to present a picture of good breeding. (The last horse to win the Gold Cup had done far better there.) And any hope of even passable credentials was blown to smithereens when she opened her mouth. Melrose wondered if even Marilyn Monroe, before her voice coach got to her, had sounded something like this. Alice’s voice was a breathless squeak.
He introduced her to Colonel Neame, who was staring so hard that his eyeballs looked as if they were on stems. Gruffly, he said, “Yes, yes, so nice.”