Chapter One
On May Day, the client walked into the offices of B.
Walker Private Inquiries, announced by a faint buzzer.
Billie Walker heard this from her position at her small sixth-floor balcony, where she’d been smoking a Lucky Strike and regarding, with a well-honed emotional detachment, the safety bridge that connected Daking House to Station House.
She heard the door, heard the little buzzer, heard her secretary-cum-assistant welcome the stranger, their voices muffled by the closed connecting door, and took a long drag.
On the slow exhale, smoke floated from Billie’s red lips, creating a temporary haze across her view of the city streets.
Cigarette dangling, Billie turned, closed the balcony doors behind her, and walked to the oval mirror on the wall inside her office.
She checked her emerald tilt hat and red lipstick in one quick and practiced movement, regarded the steady blue-green eyes staring back at her in the reflection, and, satisfied, made for the corner of her wide wooden desk and stubbed out the last of her fag.
Smoke drifted upward, settling in the air.
The Bakelite clock above her door informed her that this potential client was right on time.
This one had made an appointment, though Billie had not been furnished with any information regarding the nature of her query, complaint, or troubles, only a surname.
Things having improved at Billie’s humble agency in recent months, Ms. Walker—the B.
of B. Walker Private Inquiries and the principal agent—no longer had to wait out long days for the phone to ring or a knock at the door, and, for the moment at least, did not need to contemplate the empty walnut chairs in the small waiting room and find odd jobs for her secretary to do.
Business was booming for Sydney’s most famous—or was it infamous? —female inquiry agent.
Billie smoothed down her skirt suit, opened the connecting door, and leaned against the open doorframe to take in the stranger who had entered her waiting room. She did so hope this wasn’t another divorce job.
“Ah, here she is now. May I present Ms. Billie Walker,” Samuel Baker, her tall secretary, announced, right on cue. “Ms. Walker, this is Mrs. Richard Montgomery.”
She still had no first name of her own, Billie thought. Shame.
Amusingly, the woman’s gaze was fixed on Billie’s secretary in his lightly pin‐striped suit and flattering tie of burgundy and sky blue that brought out his baby blues.
A flirtatious smile played on the older woman’s painted lips as she regarded him.
To be true, Sam was a pleasing sight. He was a strapping Australian lad whose experience of the war had left him changed, most notably his injured left hand, which was always covered in a leather glove, lending him a touch of mystery.
That hand had come up against an Italian thermos bomb and was now missing a few fingers, replaced by wooden prosthetics.
Sam had already proved himself invaluable on numerous occasions, so if Billie had his injury to thank for the fact he was happy to work for her, well, the army’s loss was her gain.
He didn’t mind taking orders from a woman—far too rare a trait, in her opinion—and his trigger hand was as whole and steady as you could ask for.
It was a bonus that he was something like Alan Ladd in appearance, though far taller, and built several ax handles across, as the saying went.
As Sam provided a handsome distraction, Billie took in the woman’s appearance quickly and efficiently, observing cues drilled into her from work as an inquiry agent and before that as a war reporter, and a childhood spent listening to her father, Barry Walker, the policeman turned private investigator who had inhabited these very offices, sitting at that wide wooden desk and smoking on that same small balcony where his only child now spent her moments of contemplation.
Always look at the shoes, he would say. The fit and quality of the suit.
The timepiece. The hat. Look at the eyes.
Each detail tells a story. Indeed it did.
At a trained glance, this woman’s story appeared to be one of style and apparent luxury—not something one saw in great abundance since the war.
The suede burgundy shoes were new and well crafted, the stockings nylon and without flaw.
(Billie suspected this woman had never had to stoop to painting her legs with gravy and drawing a line up the back of her legs with eye pencil to create the illusion of stockings, as so many had.) The Akoya pearl set she wore was delicate and quite real, Billie was sure, that particularly desirable luster not being possible in the new fakes.
Her navy skirt suit was notable for being of the latest style, echoing the scandalously feminine silhouette of Christian Dior’s “New Look” that had taken the fashion world by storm months before: softly rounded shoulders, nipped waist, a slightly fuller skirt falling to mid-calf—not quite full enough to cause outrage on the streets of Sydney, rationing still being in place, but enough to set this woman apart as a specimen of fashion, a local doyenne of the Parisian trend.
Yes, it set her apart, as did the genuine high-quality glass-eyed fox stole she wore around her shoulders. This was no prewar throwback.
Mrs. Montgomery somehow had her finger on the pulse of international fashion trends and had money and the tailors to pull it off for her.
Billie rather wanted to get a name. One thing was for certain: This was a woman of means, and that impression was confirmed by the crowning glory of her engagement ring, which was more than a carat, Billie’s trained eye told her, and completely overshadowed the comparatively simple wedding ring worn with it.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Montgomery,” Billie said and meant it, satisfied that she was attracting the kind of clientele whose checks were unlikely to bounce like rubber.
She lifted her shoulder off the doorframe and smiled, locking eyes with the Joan Crawford–esque beauty.
Mrs. Montgomery had large eyes in a strong, rectangular face, her gaze direct and framed by dyed red hair worn short across the forehead and swept back in a center part beneath a flat, tilted navy hat.
It was the face of a strong-willed woman of high standards.
“Won’t you come into my office?” Billie said, and turned on her stacked Oxford heel.
She disappeared inside and the woman followed in the investigator’s wake, her posture erect and proud, eyes flicking back to Sam, who was trailing just behind.
If he was bothered by the woman’s flirtatious gaze, he didn’t let on.
The office Billie Walker welcomed this fashionable stranger into was not the kind of surrounds where Mrs. Montgomery would seem, under normal circumstances, to belong.
Though Billie was not exactly unglamorous herself, with the striking contrast of her dark hair and pale skin, and her Tussy’s Fighting Red lipstick, the utilitarian office suited her like a battered trench coat or well-traveled uniform.
It was a place of action, with Billie herself a devotee of action, as the war years and more recent events as an inquiry agent attested.
Fashion was something she enjoyed and employed in her profession to gain entry to all echelons of society, but her office had very few frills about it.
Her aristocratic mother, if she ever again deigned to lower herself enough to grace those four walls, would complain the place “lacked a woman’s touch,” despite the space now being occupied by Billie and her so far exclusively female clientele.
Billie had left it much the same as when her late father had operated his agency.
The carpets were rust red, the filing cabinets a fading hunter green, the wooden desk appropriately scarred, all of it imbued with the sense of his presence, now further layered by this new generation of Walker investigator.
The only concessions to its new occupant were the placement of the handy mirror, a small bottle of Bandit perfume on a shelf, some personal photographs, and the addition of a few of the more fashionable women’s journals in the waiting room.
The place suited Billie well, as if her late father had lovingly worn it in for her.
Sam plugged the doorway to the office, waiting, knowing the next part of this client ritual well.
“Would you care for tea, Mrs. Montgomery?” Billie asked, once the woman was comfortably seated across the desk in the chair she reserved for clients.
“Thank you kindly,” she replied, and broad-shouldered Sam disappeared, gently closing the door behind him with a barely audible click.
Billie had seen him throw full-grown men across an alley with his good hand, but he played down his physical size and strength in situations such as this, his strategic invisibility well practiced.
Mrs. Montgomery—who had taken the time to watch Sam go—was now surveying the space around her.
Although such roughly finished spaces did not seem her natural habitat, she showed no signs of disappointment.
Perhaps, if she’d been living as a bird in the proverbial gilded cage—as was one theory Billie was forming—more salubrious surrounds would not be comforting in this moment.
Something had brought her out of her natural habitat and into Billie’s.
“Are you the only woman investigator in Sydney?” Mrs. Montgomery asked.