Chapter 11 Snakes Alive #2
Hortense and Ivor were a husband-and-wife team who had landed the job of designing the Parlours.
Even if you didn’t know, you would have guessed that Ivor was a designer from the heavy shawl-collared cardigan he was wearing and the pipe he was holding but not smoking.
He looked as though he was modelling for a knitting pattern.
Hortense was terrifically arty, in a Bloomsbury kind of way.
Very tall, almost unnaturally so, her signature was the enormous necklaces handmade from a bizarre assortment of materials that she wore like breastplates over her great bosom, which navigated ahead of her like the prow of a ship.
This morning she was ornamented with some kind of stomacher that seemed to have been constructed from nuts and bolts and bits of pipe.
She was making extravagant gestures to a joiner who had a stubby pencil behind one ear and a cigarette behind the other and was staring at his feet, quietly ignoring everything Hortense was saying to him and patiently waiting for her to finish berating him so that he could get back to his work.
Flynn had heard rumours about discontent from on high with the way the Parlours were being outfitted. Their furnishings and fittings were “too luxurious” and beyond the budget of “the common man.” No mention of the common woman. Maud Ogilvie would have stood up for her.
“And why do the Fowlers get to design all the Parlours—all seven!” Hetty said.
“Seven now?” Flynn said.
“They’re breeding,” Margot said.
Hetty sighed. “Meanwhile, I’m stuck with a Kitchen.”
“Count yourself fortunate,” Margot said. “I’ve got a ‘Room for a Two-Year-Old.’ And my designer’s a martinet.”
“I know. Bad luck. Mine’s a sweetheart,” Hetty said, jumping off the washing machine. “He’s called Philip, and he makes his own jam.”
“His rhubarb’s lovely,” Margot said, a remark that made them both crease with laughter.
“I can get you a Marmet pushchair, if that’s any good,” Flynn offered.
“Definitely for a doll? Not full-size for a kid?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a life-saver.”
“Harry always comes up with the goods,” Hetty said.
“She’s German,” Margot said, returning to glaring at Hortense.
“Do you hold that against her?” Flynn asked.
“Very much so. I was on ack-acks in Hyde Park. Thought I was going to die every night. I had a cousin killed in the Sheffield raids. A boyfriend who went down on HMS Hermione in the Med. Don’t you still hate the Germans, Harry?”
“Saw the beginning of the Blitz, but after that I didn’t have too much to do with them, to be honest,” he said.
“Harry was out East,” Hetty said to Margot. “Japs,” she mouthed silently to her.
“Burma? Oh, you poor lamb,” Margot murmured as though he were a child in need of comfort. “Was it absolute hell?”
Flynn shrugged. “Others had it as bad.” He was thinking of Evans. Of almost every returning soldier since Troy and Thermopylae. Suffering wasn’t a competition, although The Competition of Suffering would be another good title for the soul-searching postwar novel that Flynn would never write.
“I spent the war in a hut,” Hetty sighed. “I would love to have been on the ack-acks.”
“A hut?” Flynn puzzled.
“I heard your French girlfriend has gone AWOL,” Margot said.
“My French girlfriend? Do you mean Delphine Dubois? She’s certainly French, but she’s not my girlfriend.”
“I’m just back from her flat in Earl’s Court,” Hetty said.
“Oh?”
“Clerical sent me,” Hetty said. “Frida—that irritating Norwegian girl—went on and on at them about how she might be lying dead behind her own front door.”
“Oh, Frida,” Margot said dismissively. “She’s such a nit-picker. She loves rules.”
“The landlord let us in,” Hetty said. “I went with Posy Walker—do you know her, Harry? Father’s a bishop.”
“Safety in numbers,” Margot said, and they both laughed. A private joke of some kind.
“And was she?” Flynn asked. “Lying dead behind her own front door? Or has she simply taken some time off work without bothering to tell anyone?”
“Occam’s razor,” Margot said. “Personally, I always prefer the less likely explanation.”
“Well, if she was a corpse, we didn’t notice,” Hetty said. “Although there was certainly no sign of life. Rather a bleak and nasty place. Anyway, the horse seems to have bolted. Cleared off back to France, I suppose.”
“So, you’re off the hook, Harry,” Margot said.
“Off the hook for what?”
“Oh, you know—last person to see her alive, and so on.”
“Alive?”
“Do you know what my theory is?” Hetty said. “About what happened to her?”
“That I killed her?”
“Don’t be silly, no one believes that. Not really. I’m pretty sure that she was having an affair. You know—married man—everything on the QT. The usual. She dropped hints. I don’t think she lived in Earl’s Court at all—not on a daily basis, anyway. I think there was a love nest somewhere.”
“Frida said something about an ex,” Flynn said.
“Love nest. I always think that’s such a lovely term,” Margot said dreamily.
“Makes me think of little birds, billing and cooing away to each other, but I suppose it’s a euphemism and in reality I expect it’s rather grubby.
” She glanced at the dove in Flynn’s arms as if it might be responsible for this sordid scenario.
“Who was she sharing this nest with? The ex?” Flynn asked.
Hetty shrugged. “No idea. But I expect it all went terribly wrong, and ergo she did a moonlight flit back to the Frogs.”
“Why was she here anyway?” Flynn asked. “Did she come during the war? Or after? Or what?”
“You didn’t have much conversation with her, did you?” Hetty laughed. “That’s what you’re supposed to do on a date, you know. So where did you grow up? Got any brothers and sisters? Oh, you like fish and chips, that’s funny, so do I.”
“Everyone likes fish and chips,” Margot said. “You have to be more probing.” She put on a debutante voice. “So, which do you prefer—Deauville or Nice? Do your people ride with the hunt?”
Flynn got the impression that neither of them talked about fish and chips when they were on a date. Deauville, perhaps.
“Of course,” Margot said thoughtfully, “she could be lying dead behind the door of the love nest.”
They were distracted by shouting coming from the Fairway, where the workmen were putting up the Skylon tower. “Engineering for the sake of engineering,” Hetty said. “What does it say to you, Harry? A cigar? A dirigible? A space rocket, perhaps. Or…”
“Don’t!” Margot squealed.
“It is quite you-know-what though, isn’t it?” Hetty said. “And they do seem to be having some trouble erecting it.”
“Do you think they’ll get it up in time?” Margot said, and they were gripped by another fit of laughter.
“It does rather lend itself to double-entendres, doesn’t it?
” Hetty said, recovering momentarily before cracking up again.
Flynn couldn’t but enjoy their spirit. They were the kind of girls who liked to do silly accents and lark around and make smutty jokes, but really they were not girls but women, women who used words like “martinet” and “double-entendres” (with a French accent) and talked about Occam’s razor.
He knew that Hetty’s father was an attaché to the British Embassy in Paris and that she’d done something interesting during the war, although he didn’t know what—in a hut apparently.
And they were the kind of girls who knew about Burma, too; sometimes it seemed to Flynn that no one else did. Or if they did, they didn’t care.
“Nothing’s ready, you know,” Hetty said. “The opening will be a disaster.” The thought cheered all three of them up.
“Oh, by the way,” Flynn said, “I just wanted to double-check with you—nobody can cook or bake anything in the Kitchens, can they?”
“God, no. That’s a mad idea.”
“We’re having lunch in the canteen,” Margot said. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Sorry, I have to get off.”
“Give me a shout if you fancy a drink sometime.”
It was curious how being suspected of having a hand in a murder seemed to make him more, rather than less, attractive to women.
“Oh, and Harry?” Hetty said. “Mind and tell the Powers That Be that my Kitchen is coming along nicely.”
—
He was pounced on by Frida as he was crossing the Fairway. “Your girlfriend’s still missing,” she said. “She went out with you and then she disappeared. Not exactly a coincidence.”
“I would have said that was the definition of a coincidence, Frida. Her disappearance has nothing to do with me. Besides which, I think you’ll find that Hetty Barker from Rooms was sent round to her flat by Clerical to check, and the consensus of opinion is that Delphine Dubois has cleared off back to where she came from.
” (He wished Frida would do the same. Norway was welcome to her.) “I have no idea where Delphine Dubois is, and to be honest I don’t really care. ”
“What have you done with her?”
“Done with her? Absolutely nothing, I’m not Bluebeard.
She’s not hanging on a hook in a cupboard in my flat.
There isn’t room to swing a cat in there, let alone hang a woman.
” It was an unfortunate turn of phrase and Frida gasped at him in showy horror.
She was given to melodrama, unusual in a Scandinavian.
“Maybe you’ve murdered her,” she said with unnecessary relish.
“Not guilty,” Flynn said. (Was he guilty?)
“There’s something very suspicious about the whole thing. Something very suspicious about you, to be honest, Flynn.”
“Maybe you’d like to come on a date with me, Frida. See if you end up dead as well, then you’ll have proof, but quite honestly, I don’t think you’re worth hanging for.”
Flynn turned on his heel and left a fuming Frida planted in the middle of the Fairway, glowering after him until a man driving a builder’s lorry hooted at her to get out of the way.
—
Only the Boy was in the office and Flynn handed him the friendless dove. “Could you flog this thing, Terence?”
“Doubt it, Mr. Flynn. I’ll take it off your hands though, someone might want it, I suppose.”