CHAPTER 3 #2
“We’re not sneering, Mrs. Murphy,” O’Malley said.
“Doesn’t my sister have that same Virgin Mary in her bedroom?
” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his beads.
“Blessed by His Holiness, they were.” He kissed the cross and put them away.
“Now, what can you tell us that the other fella didn’t bother to ask? ”
“I didn’t see her the morning she left. I was busy in the shop. But the night before, Franny said she might be late because a new girl at the store had invited her home for supper. That other sergeant didn’t believe me. I could see what he was thinking. He thought she’d run off with some man.”
“I believe she worked as a dressmaker’s assistant at Harvey Nicols and Company,” Tennant said. “Is that right?”
“Three years, now.”
“Did she mention the name of the new girl who invited her?”
Mrs. Murphy shook her head. “I was so glad of the invitation. Franny’s closest friend married and moved to Canada a year ago, and she missed her.”
“She had no other near acquaintances?” Tennant said.
“She walked to Mass with the Callahan girls. Sweet things they are, but I doubt they’ll tell you much. Franny hadn’t much in common with them.”
“Just the same, we’d like their names and addresses.”
“Franny was a lovely lass,” O’Malley said. “She must have had admirers.”
“Oh, she had plenty of them. ‘I’m in no hurry,’ she’d say to me. Taking her time to look about.”
“Are you recalling anything out of the ordinary?” O’Malley said. “Something that has you wondering?”
She frowned, considering. “She was working extra hours at Harvey Nicols, on and off.”
“Starting when?” Tennant asked.
“Last summer. It was strange not to have her sitting across from me in the evening, and I worried. But she was grateful for the extra money, and they sent her home in a cab.”
Tennant stood. “I’d like to see her bedroom, if I may.”
Mrs. Murphy led them to a bright, comfortable chamber.
If the room knew Franny’s secrets, it kept them close.
Tennant found only two things of interest: a drawing and some letters.
The girl had pinned a pencil sketch of herself to the wall above her dressing table.
Someone had signed it with the initials WQ.
“It’s a good likeness of Franny,” Mrs. Murphy said.
“May I borrow it?”
Mrs. Murphy unpinned it and smiled at the picture. “An artist in Hyde Park drew it.”
“And we need to read the letters from her friend in Canada,” Tennant said. “I will return them, of course.”
At the door, Mrs. Murphy said, “Franny’s best dress was missing from her wardrobe, but I wasn’t telling the other sergeant that.”
* * *
The interview with the Callahan girls was as unproductive as the landlady predicted.
Tennant pulled out his watch. “I think we can make it to Harvey Nicols before its doors close.” He flagged a cab and directed the driver to Knightsbridge and Sloan Street. They settled in, and he shuffled through the letters, handing half to O’Malley.
“Let’s start with late spring before Franny begins to work longer hours.”
They rattled along reading until O’Malley broke the silence. “Here’s something, now. Listen to this from June of last year. ‘He sounds like a charmer—and the money is almost too good to be true. That should make you think twice.’”
“The offensive sergeant may have been right,” Tennant said. “There was a man in the picture. A charmer with money to throw around.”
Several letters from the summer included tantalizing references. “I’m glad I turned out to be a nervous Nelly,” Tennant read. “And this one: It seems to be going well.”
“If only the girl would say what ‘it’ is all about,” O’Malley grumbled.
“I’ll cable the Toronto Police tomorrow and have them track the friend down.”
The cab pulled up to Harvey Nicols thirty minutes before closing time. Tennant passed Franny’s picture to his sergeant. “Show it to the man behind that newspaper kiosk and chat up the doorman. I’ll see what they can tell me inside.”
The store manager and the ladies’ dress department supervisor were cooperative and polite, but they had little to say about Franny aside from her skill as a needlewoman.
Tennant’s question about her working hours puzzled them.
They hadn’t asked her to stay late and never sent their help home by cab.
When the inspector asked to see the recently employed girl who worked with Franny, they looked blank.
“A new girl?” the store manager said. “We haven’t added to our female staff in over a year, Inspector.”
“Was Miss Riley friendly with any of the gentlemen who work here?”
The manager turned frosty. “We at Harvey Nicols discourage fraternizing among the staff.”
“May I speak to the other seamstresses you employ?”
“Of course, Inspector.”
Tennant sighed when the supervisor led him to a pair of ladies thirty years Franny’s senior. He guessed they were unlikely confidants, and he was right.
* * *
Outside, O’Malley waited while the doorman helped a lady into a carriage.
The man pocketed a coin and whistled his way back to the sergeant.
The doorman remembered the Saturday evening Franny left the store and never returned.
She usually caught an omnibus heading east on Knightsbridge.
That afternoon, she turned west and walked down Brompton Road.
“She was easy on the eyes,” he said, “and a pleasant, well-spoken young lady.” He scratched his head under the sweatband of the hat.
“Now that I think about it . . . when I turned back from a customer to look for her, she was gone. I remember thinking she must have hailed a cab or gotten into a carriage.”
Tennant joined O’Malley on the pavement.
“‘Discourages fraternizing,’ does he?” The sergeant snorted on hearing the manager’s remarks. “The law discourages many a thing, and here we are, chasing down criminals every day.”
“Nothing from the doorman?”
“Walking a different way on the last night, says he.” O’Malley explained the girl’s changed route. “We haven’t learned much after a day’s work.”
“We know that Franny lied to Mrs. Murphy about her plans and how she earned her extra money. She walked down one of London’s busier roads in her best dress and headed toward Chelsea. Then she vanished.”
“Until weeks later, we found the poor lass in a sack.”
* * *
Mary Allingham felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck. She didn’t look around. Artists like Mary often sketched in the South Kensington Museum, and visitors stopped to watch. An observer wasn’t unusual, but a critique was.
Someone with a pronounced Irish lilt said, “Those Muses, now. I’m thinking you’ve made them look too . . . amused.”
Mary twisted around on the bench. A tall man with an unruly head of curly black hair looked down at her.
“You’re mistaken. And they’re not the Muses. They’re The Three Graces.” She pointed her chalk at Antonio Canova’s sculpture in the hall’s center.
“A quibble.” He set his paint box down and circled the statue. Blue tints from a shaft of sunlight shone in his jet-black hair. “Sure, it wouldn’t be gentlemanly of me to say your Graces aren’t graceful.”
Mary eyed him slowly, tracking his scuffed boots, unbuttoned corduroy jacket, paint-smeared cuff, and loosely knotted necktie. He looked aggressively shabby.
“Gentlemanly?” Mary lifted a brow. “Hardly.”
He smiled, his eyes glinting. More green than blue, Mary decided, with flecks of gold. Their expression irritated her.
The man glanced at her paint box. “M. Allingham . . . that wouldn’t be Mrs. Charles Allingham, would it?”
“It wouldn’t.” She held up her ringless left hand. “For an artist, you’re not very observant. Charles is my brother.”
“An understandable error. Didn’t I hear that Mrs. Allingham is the loveliest woman in all of London?”
Mary sighed and replaced her pastel chalks in their box. “It’s rather late. I must be going, ah . . . sir.”
“And where are my manners, now? Allow me to introduce myself.” He dragged an oatmeal tweed cap from his back pocket, tugged it over his dark curls, and swept it off again. “William Sheridan Quain, at your service, of Ballykilmuckeridge Downs, County Offaly, Ireland.”
Mary blinked; he grinned. “Sure, the English like an Irishman who comes from a place with a comical name, so I oblige them. Truth be told, I’m from Waterford, like the glass. William Sheridan Quain. Will to my friends.”
Mary picked up her paint box. “You must excuse me, I’m late.” She crossed the foyer, walked through the doors, and down the steps.
Quain followed and looked around. “Where is your carriage?”
“I’m walking.”
“To Blenheim Lodge on your own? Without a maid?”
Mary stopped. “How do you know where—”
“Didn’t your brother invite me over to show him my work? Didn’t he spend a few quid on some watercolors of mine? And you, away, studying in Paris? Sure, I can’t let you go off on your own.”
“You needn’t concern yourself, Mister Quain. I cut through the gardens where there are many strollers about.”
“If it’s determined you are, I’ll let you go. But I’ll be watching you until you reach the gate.”
As she approached the garden entrance, Mary thought, I won’t look back.
When she looked over her shoulder, Will Quain waved his cap.
* * *
An hour after dinner, Mary tapped on the study door. “Am I interrupting?”
Charles shook his head. He’d laid his pen and spectacles atop a sheet of pristine paper. His glass and the whiskey decanter sat at his right elbow, its level down by several inches.
“Trouble getting your article started?”
Charles grunted a reply, tossed his drink, and poured another. He looked drawn and thin, with smudgy half-moons hanging under his eyes.
“Take a pew,” Charles said. After she seated herself, he leaned on his elbow, chin in his hand. “What can I do for my lovely sister?”
“A forward Irishman accosted me at the museum today. William Quain claimed to know you. He said you’d bought some sketches from him.”
“Quain . . . yes . . . ’musing fellow. Talented painter.” Charles reached into the bottom drawer, pulled out a leather folder, and opened it. “This one’s quite good.”
Quain had painted a country scene, capturing the distant fields in quick strokes of every shade of green. He’d rendered the stream in daubs of purple, cobalt, teal, and Prussian blue. In the distance, wisps of whitish smoke roughly sketched curled from the chimney of a fieldstone cottage.
“He’s spent time in France,” Mary said.
“Quain’s had a rough go of it. Fools at the Royal Academy schools rejected him.”
Mary pulled two more pictures from the portfolio.
The first was a watercolor of a woman’s head and shoulders; the second showed her in full figure, standing at her washstand.
Arms raised, eyes closed, she toweled dry a waterfall of coppery curls.
A dressing gown of emerald silk lay tossed on the rumpled sheets of the bed behind her.
The scene was intimate, the pose sensual. The model had never looked lovelier.
“Margot Miller,” Mary said.
“Yes.” He drained his glass and stared into it.
“May I take away the Irish landscape? I’d like to study it.”
“Take the lot.” He swept the sketches into the folder and pushed it across the desk. “On the wrong tack . . . too close to the wind. I warned him. . . .”
“Warned who? Charles, what’s wrong? Is it the business? Talk to me.”
“No . . . nothing to talk about.” He placed his palms on the desk and pushed himself up.
He tottered, and Mary thought he would topple forward.
Then he steadied himself. “Nothing a change of scene won’t cure.
Leaving in the morning for Wales. David Cox wants my ’pinion on some landscapes he’s painted. ”
“Louisa said nothing about a trip.”
Charles weaved to his dressing room door and leaned against the frame. “Doesn’t know yet. I’ll speak to her in the morning.”
“Will you be here for the women’s exhibition? It opens in a week. A review by the eminent Charles Allingham . . .” She smiled. “We could use the attention.”
“I’ll be back. ’Night, m’ dear.”
The door clicked as he shut himself inside his small dressing chamber, a room with a single, narrow bed.
He’d been sleeping there for weeks.