Chapter 14 A Favour
A Favour
“Breaking and entering? You want me to steal for you?”
“Not stealing, old chap.” Archie looked affronted. “It’s retrieving my rightful property. I’m being blackmailed, that’s what’s criminal.”
“Who’s blackmailing you?”
“You don’t need to know that. In fact, better that you don’t. And it’s not breaking and entering because I’ll give you a key.”
“Why do you have a key?”
“Questions, questions. The person who lives there—”
“The blackmailer?”
“The person who lives there will not be at home tonight. I know this for a cast-iron fact, so you don’t need to worry on that front. And the paramount thing is that you will be saving Mitzi’s honour.”
“Why can’t you? She’s your wife.”
“Gammy leg,” Archie said, knocking on his thigh as if it were a door. It did sound odd. He had a wooden leg? Flynn had not previously noticed any limp. “Old war wound. Not very nimble on the stairs.”
“What is it exactly, Archie, that you want me not to steal?”
“There are some, shall we say, ‘compromising’ photographs. If they were to become public knowledge, they would ruin Mitzi’s reputation.”
“You mean nude photos?”
“Worse than that.”
“Worse?” Flynn said. “In flagrante, you mean? With a man? The blackmailer? Or someone else?”
“Best not to go into details,” Archie said.
“Suffice to say, if the photographs got out it would be utterly humiliating for Mitzi. She’s known for her spotless character.
” (Did Archie know about Mrs. Ramsbottom’s establishment?) “Housewife’s choice and so on.
There would be an appalling hullabaloo if they fell into the wrong hands.
Some sleazy journo-wallah, say. And, of course, it wouldn’t do you any good either, old man. ”
“Me?”
“You’re the one who chose her for the cake. Given your current troubles with your absent lady friend, I don’t think you need any more speculation attached to your name. And, after all, the man in the photographs is anonymous. Could be anyone. Could be you.”
Christ, Flynn thought. He would rather bed Medusa than Mitzi. “So now you’re blackmailing me, Archie?”
“Dirty word, ‘blackmail,’ Flynn. I prefer ‘quid pro quo.’ You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Come up with the goods and I guarantee that you’ll be off the hook for your missing mademoiselle.”
Archie stood up, drained his drink and said, “Best be off. Don’t want Mitzi worrying about where I’ve got to.
So, I can trust you to get those photos back, can I, Flynn?
I’ll give you the address, shall I?” He produced a book, tore out a page and scribbled in the margin.
Flynn recognized the book: it was Perfect Cooking by Parkinson.
The page carried recipes for, amongst other dishes, curried cod, stewed eels and stuffed roast lamb’s hearts.
The idea of eating a heart, let alone one that a lamb had a more legitimate claim to, made Flynn qualmish.
“Report back to me here afterwards. And another thing—don’t look at those nudies when you find them, don’t peruse them, as it were. Mitzi would be mortified if she thought you had seen her in the buff. Oh, and Flynn?” Archie dropped his voice. “Take your gun, old chap.”
“Don’t have a gun, Archie.”
Once Archie had left, Flynn lit a cigarette and ordered another whisky.
“Looks like you need it,” the landlady said.
“Oh, you know—the office.”
“I don’t know, actually, dear. Never worked in an office.”
“Count yourself lucky.”
—
It was a balmy evening, and to a casual observer Flynn must have looked like a man taking a leisurely stroll across town rather than someone intent on criminal activity.
The flat was in Half Moon Street, on the top floor.
There was a spyhole in the door, and for a disquieting moment Flynn imagined that there was an eye behind it and that the owner of the eye was waiting to nab him the moment he passed over the threshold.
He knew that he should not have agreed to this enterprise, but he was here now, so he steeled himself and turned the key—a simple Yale—in the lock and entered warily.
He wondered if Archie’s “cast-iron” guarantee that no one was home might be some kind of bluff.
An entrapment. This was an idiotic escapade, and yet here he was, being an idiot.
A scattering of unopened post littered the doormat.
Flynn stood for a few moments in the hallway, listening for any sign of life.
Smelling for it too, his nose raised, seeking out danger.
Like a hunter. Or the hunted. The stale scent of cigarettes and alcohol was overlaid by a trace of the sickly-sweet stench of rotting flowers.
Freesias? He thought of Cynthia, but why would she have been here?
It was hardly likely, although more likely than his own freesia-scented dead mother.
The place felt cold and lifeless. No one, dead or otherwise, had breathed here for several days.
He froze. There was a noise coming from somewhere in the flat.
Had Archie indeed lied about the occupant not being at home?
Yet it was an odd sound—as if someone—or something—was shambling around in a haphazard fashion, knocking things over, barging into walls.
Perhaps they were ill or injured. Flynn advanced cautiously along the dark hallway, following the disturbance, and found himself in a bedroom, where he discovered that the cause of the commotion was a common street pigeon—the poor man’s version of a dove—lumbering around in hapless slow-motion panic, caroming round the room and knocking things over.
It didn’t seem intelligent enough to understand that the open window that had been its entrance was also its egress and considered itself to be helplessly trapped. Flynn felt a certain kinship with it.
He opened the window as wide as it would go, and after a lot of coaxing the brainless bird stopped cannoning off the walls, slipped awkwardly out and took wing, arrowing out into the night sky and disappearing into the dark.
Like any good burglar Flynn had brought a torch, although it took him a while to adjust to its weak beam as he trod tentatively across a floor that was dotted with rugs, the entire purpose of which seemed to be to trip up the unwary housebreaker.
Even in the gloomy illumination provided by the torch, he could see that the whole place was a tip.
There were signs of a raucous evening having taken place.
He righted a lamp that had fallen over. He picked up a magazine from the floor that he had almost skated on.
In the small kitchen he trod on something sticky.
A woman lived here, that was clear. A slovenly woman.
Clothes and underwear were strewn carelessly around the bedroom, and pots and potions littered a dressing-table that was covered in a fine dusting of face powder.
The smell of rotting flowers was stronger now; something had died in here and left the ghost of its scent behind.
Flynn traced it not to a corpse but to a vase of decaying freesias.
He was relieved that he hadn’t imagined the scent.
Archie had been vague about the exact whereabouts of the photographs.
All Flynn knew was that they were in a Manila envelope—which he found after much raking around, hidden beneath one of the seat cushions on the sofa.
Ignoring Archie’s instruction not to look at the “nudies,” he gingerly slipped the contents out, unsure as to what horrors he might find when he shone the torch over them.
It was clear from even a tentative glimpse that Archie hadn’t been wrong when he called the photographs compromising.
“Damning” might have been a better word.
The man in the pictures was anonymous, cut off at the head, although his member, standing at full mast, was disconcertingly visible.
(“Fallick,” Flynn couldn’t help thinking.) If these images became public, conjecture about the ownership of this particular piece of anatomy would be the subject of endless debate.
There was nothing anonymous about Mitzi, however.
The photographs portrayed a somewhat younger version, but there was no mistaking her, recognizable in all her black-and-white glory: the girlish ribbon in her hair, the neck laden with costume jewels and the busy beringed fingers.
Flynn had expected, at worst, fellatio, but some of the acts Mitzi was performing were so blue that they would have made a Soho strip-club proprietor blush.
Even Mrs. Ramsbottom might have felt embarrassment at her alumna’s brazen exploits.
—
On his way out, he scooped up the post from the doorstep and rifled quickly through it in case it gave any clues to the blackmailer’s identity.
He was hoping for a name, but there was only a gas bill addressed unhelpfully to “The Occupier,” an equally unhelpful flyer from a local church, and a little card advertising the services of a local tradesman, exactly the kind of thing that Flynn once composed—George Smith and Son—Joiners.
No Job Too Small. He slipped the card in his pocket because only the other day Maud Ogilvie had said she was looking for a reliable handyman to fix a sash window.
He left, pulling the door shut behind him.
“Are you looking for the French lady?”
Flynn nearly jumped out of his skin. Turning round, he found himself face-to-face with an elderly woman coming out of the flat next door. Did she think he was a burglar? (He was a burglar, of course.)
“I’m sorry, did I startle you? I’m Miss Norris—her next-door neighbour. She’s not at home, I’m afraid. I haven’t heard or seen her for several days.”
“The French lady?” Flynn felt a stab of foreboding. “And that would be Miss…?”
“Dubois.”
“Delphine Dubois?”
“I believe so, although we weren’t really on first-name terms.”
Flynn’s brain convulsed with horror. This was Delphine’s flat? The missing, possibly murdered Delphine? What in God’s name did Archie have to do with her?