The Mammoth Book Of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Part 17

He feared right. Louis could be facing an army of flesh-eating zombies and he'd con them back to the grave.

"Look."

Teddy lifted a hank of dark hair to reveal a puncture wound in Boucard's dirty neck.

"The ice pick or whatever severed his spinal cord, paralyzing all muscular activity. The lungs stopped functioning, so did the heart, but death, as always I'm afraid, comes slowly."

Fizzy reeled and was immediately caught in a steel net that smelled of ski slopes and pine.

"Never fear, Phyllis Potter of 62 Northwell Drive, Bayswater. Looks like he was unconscious when it happened."

Fizzy disentangled herself from his arms, slightly surprised that bookbinders had so many muscles.

"Why aren't the police swarming all over this room?" she asked.

"Ah, well. It would appear our boys in blue haven't realized that there would be more blood, had Louis been alive when he was brained, and knowing the blunt instrument to be a favourite among the criminal undercla.s.s, they rather fancy one of those as the culprit."

Solicitously, Teddy straightened her hat. Fizzy jerked away, hoping he couldn't see the furious blush that had suffused her cheeks.

"What guff," she snapped. "Those girls aren't on the game because they enjoy it. They're dishing out knee-tremblers because they've run out of options, and even if one of them had killed Louis Boucard, they'd never leave a fortune in cocaine lying around."

Not when it would buy them their freedom and no self-respecting thief would dream of walking away empty-handed, no matter how pushed they had been to commit murder!

"Precisely the argument I presented to His Majesty's law enforcers," he began, but whatever else he was going to say was overtaken by the door bursting open and Chilton, Orville, Gloria and a uniformed inspector rushing into the room.

"This is an outrage," Chilton was bl.u.s.tering. "An absolute b.l.o.o.d.y outrage! Why should I want to kill him?"

"You have a persuasive line in arguments, Mr Hardcastle," Fizzy muttered under her breath. "You got them to abandon the criminal undercla.s.s, so they're pinching Chilton's collar instead."

The inspector shot her a venomous glance and continued.

"You were overheard threatening the deceased in the Pink Parrot nightclub last night," he told Chilton, leaving the a.s.sembled company in no doubt as to his opinion of such a den of tangoed iniquity. "Lewis Buckard had given the press an unauthorized showing-"

"For heaven's sake, man, it's Louis," Chilton protested, "p.r.o.nounced Boo-car."

" and he'd also been holding out on you with regard to a mysterious portrait. To wit, this."

He indicated the easel in the corner draped in black velvet.

"Inspector," Orville cut in, "I have explained how Mr Westlake was in plain view of everyone at all times this afternoon. I don't see how you can possibly follow this ridiculous line of questioning."

In true political style, the Hon. Member then rephrased his argument in fifteen different ways. Somewhere between the fourth and the fifth, Gloria came across and took both Fizzy's hands in hers.

"Are you all right, darling? You look terribly pale."

"Yes, I'm fine, really I am. Just a shock, that's all, seeing death at close quarters."

She glanced at Teddy Hardcastle, who had seen more of it and at far closer quarters, then looked back into Gloria's permanently sad eyes.

They'd been laughing, that was the terrible part. Celebrating because Fizzy had landed her first job with a la Mode and Gloria had just received confirmation that baby number two, already well advanced, was healthy and ready to hatch out on schedule. Yes, they'd been laughing fit to burst when that telegram came . . .

Fizzy shivered. "The police don't really suspect Chilton, do they?"

"Darling, if they had a man standing over the body waving a placard written in Louis's own blood which read 'It was me', they'd still think the butler did it."

Gloria glanced at her husband, boring the inspector into submission.

"Orville will set them right," she a.s.sured her.

Shouldn't be hard, either, Fizzy supposed. To compensate for his physical shortcomings, Chilton upholstered himself in the loudest checks he could find. Top that with a purple bow tie and spats, and who could miss him?'

"For goodness sake," Chilton snorted. "I'm hardly likely to kill the goose that lays my golden eggs, am I, you clod?"

The inspector, who wasn't entirely won over by being labelled a clod, didn't take to having his chest prodded, either.

"You're wasting time," Chilton snapped, "and anyway, what about the theft of my picture, eh? Eh? Why aren't you investigating that?"

"What picture?" Fizzy asked Gloria.

Patrician eyes rolled. "Wouldn't you just know that while this kerfuffle's been going on, someone would filch one of the exhibits? Of course, it'll be worth a fortune on the black market after today. Chilton's incandescent."

"Nonsense," Fizzy murmured. "He probably snitched it himself, to drive up the price of the others."

"So true, darling. No artist is ever worth so much as when he dies."

Meanwhile, the combination of being branded incompetent, a dim-wit, having a finger poked in his breast bone and being blasted with the notion that theft ranked higher than murder was doing little to enhance the inspector's opinion of Chilton. Especially since the accusations were being made in front of the Hon. Member for Knightsbridge & Chelsea.

"What Mr Westlake is forgetting, sir," he told Orville, "is that apart from Lewis Buckard playing him for a sucker over the publicity, he'd borrowed money from him totalling nearly one hundred pounds, which he apparently had no intention of repaying, and we know he was holding out on him."

He indicated the velvet-draped easel as he read from the press.

". . . the likes of which has never been on public display before in this country a portrait so daring, so scandalous that he's keeping it under velvet until the official opening. 'Revelation', Mr Buckard called it."

With a flourish that could only be described as smug, he whisked off the velvet.

Revelation indeed. Six pair of eyes gaped at the empty frame.

Teddy Hardcastle let out a soft laugh.

"B-but-" Chilton couldn't find words to express what he felt.

"Well, I say!" Orville could.

The inspector rubbed his jaw for what seemed like an hour, pausing only to glower at Chilton in the way a lioness might watch her marked zebra leap the gorge into safety.

"Do you suppose," he asked eventually, "that it was within Mr Buckard's character to pull a fast one to drum up publicity? That there never was a scandalous portrait to unveil?"

Five voices responded as one, the verdict unanimous. Such a stunt was well within Boucard's capabilities, they replied.

Cue more jaw-rubbing by His Majesty's servant.

"Whoever killed Mr Buckard did so by holding the weapon in this-" he held up one of numerous soft cloths used in the gallery to dust the frames " to avoid leaving fingerprints. Unfortunately, we have no witnesses to say they saw anyone go in or come out of this room."

"Why would they?" Orville asked reasonably. "We were all facing the podium, inspector, anxiously awaiting the moment when the doors to the exhibition would open and we could be one of the first to see, and hopefully grab a slice of, this new and prodigious young talent."

"There were nearly eighty people crammed into my gallery," Chilton snapped, "and not all of them with gilt-edged invites, I might add. You mark my words, one of those low-lifes killed Louis."

The inspector turned his scowl on Teddy Hardcastle, making it clear who was responsible for diverting precious resources on this ridiculous wild goose chase when the police had had it sussed all along. With a loud "harrumph" he stomped back into the gallery, trailed by Chilton and Orville, with Gloria adding poise to the rear and leaving Fizzy alone with Teddy once more. This time, though, the silence between them stretched to infinity.

"The question," he said at last, "isn't who killed Louis Boucard, is it?"

"No?" Frogs croak louder, she thought.

"No." He let the wall take his weight at the shoulder. "The question is, why should two people want to kill the same man."

Turning out of the gallery into the glorious midsummer sunshine, a mischievous breeze whisked off Gloria's hat and carried it halfway down Mayfair. Biff, of course, would have tackled it before it had gone fifteen yards, but Biff was already ensconced in Jo-Jo's Jazz Cellar sinking his second martini and by the time the Hon. Member for K&C had picked up sufficient speed, a Ford with an unnecessarily heavy foot on its accelerator had flattened Gloria's masterpiece right between the tulle and the rosebuds. Another time and the group would have hooted with laughter. Today, though, a man's life had been taken and the crushing, in an instant, of something so vibrant and bright stood for all that had happened.

On the other hand, it's an ill wind. Fizzy couldn't help but notice the look of grat.i.tude and affection that Gloria shot her husband as handed the battered t.i.tfer back to his wife and her heart gladdened. He was a good egg, the Hon. Member, and whilst he wasn't and would never be the love of her friend's life, she'd always felt he deserved more than mere recognition.

"Well?" A long stride fell into step alongside her, its fedora angled low over one half of his forehead.

"Any more thoughts?"

In front of them, Orville had offered a chivalrous arm to his wife and although Fizzy had hoped for a similar offer from Teddy, none came. She adjusted her beads, smoothed her drop waistline, tucked her clutch bag under her arm and thought, who cares about floppy hair anyway?

"I mean," he added evenly, "you must know it's one of us.'

"Don't you mean two of us?"

Dammit, Pekingese dogs don't snap that hard, but if Teddy Hardcastle noticed, it didn't show.

"Foxy called him a cad and a bounder," he said, "and not without justification. Did you know Boucard conned him out of five hundred pounds?"

"How much?"

To an ill.u.s.trator of children's books, that was a fortune, and Fizzy calculated that she'd have to work until she was a hundred and twenty-eight to cover that kind of spare cash. Oh, Foxy, Foxy, what have you done . . . ?

"We've already heard the inspector's case against Chilton," Teddy said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

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 ill.u.s.trators came in on a level with doodlers?

"Also, our Parisian friend helped himself to a whole pile of Bubble's jewels in, quote, payment for services rendered, unquote. He derided Catspaw's cartoons in the press, got Marriott to underwrite an enterprise that didn't exist and 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 pa.s.sionately Biff feels about his sister's honour. Damme," he added lightly, "if the list ain't just about endless."

"Aren't you're 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 t.i.tle-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 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 Sat.u.r.day?" Biff wanted to know. "Well, how about the Sat.u.r.day 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 jaloppy. What d'you say, old girl? Are you up for it?"

"Excuse me."

She had to pa.s.s 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.