Chapter 19 D-Day Minus One #2
“You are the enemy, Margot.” Hetty laughed. “Your father’s a Tory grandee. Queen Mary’s a splendid old bat though,” she said to Flynn. “I was taken to tea with her once.”
“German,” Margot said.
“Well, they all are, aren’t they? That’s why they have to work so hard at being English.”
“British,” Flynn said.
“You’re looming, Harry. Did you want something? Or was it just our fascinating company you were seeking?”
“Looking for Badger, Margot.”
“Haven’t you found him yet?” Hetty said. “He was over in the Lion and Unicorn. He’s just picked up a Constable from the National Gallery—they needed an extra painting, apparently.”
“…and the Chester Herald. Their Majesties take their place in their seats…”
“By the way, Harry, that awful woman’s here.”
“Mitzi? Where?”
“She’s set up shop in the ‘Farmhouse Kitchen for the Middle Classes.’ The Farmhouse people are quite distressed. You should go and sort it out. She needs leashing in.”
“She was looking for you,” Margot added.
Flynn beat a hasty retreat back across the river. He had, to borrow another phrase from Maud Ogilvie, “a task elsewhere.”
—
In Half Moon Street, to be exact. He still had the key that Archie had given him.
There had to be some clue there, some spoor belonging to Delphine Dubois’s killer, some careless evidence that had been left behind.
Heaven knows he had probably left enough of his own.
And as a bonus he could also double-check that no corpses had been left lying around.
He was halfway up the stairs to Delphine’s flat when he heard someone behind him.
Miss Norris, Delphine’s neighbour, struggling with a bag of groceries.
“Oh, it’s Inspector Smith, isn’t it?” she said when he relieved her of her burden, and before he knew it he was inside her flat, sitting on her sofa, being offered a “small sherry.” She always had one at lunchtime, she said, as it helped “perk her up” for the rest of the day.
Flynn regretted he was unable to accept the sherry because he was “on duty”—he could have done with a bit of perking up, but he thought it was probably best to stay in character.
And he was glad of the opportunity to find out what he could about the goings-on in the neighbouring flat.
He had rather hoped he might bump into Miss Norris again.
What could she tell him about the missing Miss Dubois?
Quite a lot, it turned out, because the walls between their flats were “paper-thin.” “The French lady had a gentleman friend,” she confided.
“And they were sometimes quite…” she hesitated, searching for a word.
“Boisterous,” she concluded. She blushed and took a sip of the sherry, the word “sex” primly unspoken between them.
“Can you describe him, this gentleman friend?” Earlier, Flynn had filched Veronica’s little notebook from her bag, the almost extinct journalist in him coming unexpectedly back to life.
He opened it now in an official police manner.
Unfortunately, he felt only too well acquainted with the ways of the police these days.
The chewed pencil hovered, ready for information.
“I’m afraid he was a married man, Inspector. The French lady was his…”
Floozy, doxy, bit of fluff. “Mistress?” Flynn supplied. The word required a dose of remedial sherry to aid its digestion.
“But then I think he wanted to end their…”
“Affair?”
“Yes. That.” She blanched at the word. (So much previously unemployed vocabulary!) “I gather he’d been abroad, and when he returned they began to have tremendous rows, but then he stopped visiting her altogether a few weeks ago.
” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, as if Delphine might be still listening on the other side of that paper-thin wall. “I think…” She faltered.
“Yes? Miss Norris?” Flynn nudged encouragingly.
“You can say anything to me. Think of me as a priest, sworn to keep the secrets of the confessional.” It’s what Badger had said to him, the morning after his date with Delphine.
Badger knew something, didn’t he? He’d talked about Flynn being in “hot water” and Flynn had dismissed his concerns, but now the water was boiling.
Best not to reach for metaphors, he counselled himself.
He needed to question Badger about what he knew.
“I think he paid the rent,” Miss Norris said, warming to her scandalous narrative.
“And I think he’d had enough of her and wanted her out of the flat.
” (She must have had her ear glued to that wall, Flynn thought.) “And she said that she was going to tell his wife about the…affair.” The word hung daringly on her lips.
One of them was going to need absolution by the time this catechism was over.
“It’s an age-old story, I’m afraid, isn’t it, Inspector? ”
So, Flynn thought, Archie—who by his own admission was “on his uppers”—couldn’t afford the love nest in Half Moon Street any longer and didn’t want Delphine herself any more, but she was resisting eviction—blackmailing him with the photographs into letting her stay there.
Hetty had said that the flat in Earl’s Court was rather “bleak and nasty,” hadn’t she?
This seemed an eminently credible scenario.
“He was rather handsome—her gentleman,” Miss Norris said, clutching a hand to her modest maidenly bosom at the memory. (What on earth would she have made of those salacious photographs? That demure heart might have given out.)
“Handsome?” Flynn frowned at the word. Not Archie, then. “Handsome” was not the adjective you would ever use to describe him.
“Good-looking,” Mrs. Norris expanded, as if Flynn might not know what handsome meant. “He had lovely eyes.”
“Oh?” The thing that had been lurking on the seabed of Flynn’s memory since his interrogation in Bow Street, gnawing away at him like a dog with a bone, began to stir.
“They were a beautiful shade of green.”
A tremor began to shake the seabed. “Do you know his name, by any chance? The handsome man?” Flynn didn’t think he’d used the word “handsome” so much in one conversation. If ever.
“Well, I heard her call him Zheel.” To pronounce the name she stretched her lips wide, revealing her worn, yellow teeth. “Or maybe Sheel? It sounded French. He wasn’t French, though. He was a proper English gentleman. I encountered him on the stairs once. Wonderful manners.”
Je suis en retard, Delphine had said to him in the Lamb and Flag. Zheel m’attend. I’m late. Zheel is waiting for me.
The memory suddenly shot up from the depths like a torpedo.
“Zheel” was how a French person would pronounce “Giles.” Handsome Zheel with his green eyes had to be Giles Dangerfield.
Flynn had presumed the wrong ex-Fascist. Delphine Dubois wasn’t Archie’s mistress, she was Giles Dangerfield’s.
And Dangerfield—presumably—was the one who had killed her.
His head felt as if it might explode. To prevent that happening, he said, “I might have that sherry now, Miss Norris, if you don’t mind?”
What was Archie’s role in all this? His friendship with Dangerfield went way back. Was Archie simply a faithful friend, always willing to help out—and not just with another man’s by-blow, but with his murdered mistress too? And then with finding a hapless idiot to pin it all on.
And here he was, the hapless idiot returning to the scene of the crime once more, only adding to the list of incriminating evidence that trailed him everywhere.
He would be in the dock and Miss Norris—an elderly lady of impeccable virtue—would enter the witness box and she would swear that she had seen him leaving a murdered woman’s flat.
Not to mention the added offence of impersonating an officer of the law.
The jury would be willing to hang, draw and quarter him on the spot.
Flynn could almost see the solemn judge reaching for his black cap, feel that noose around his neck.
If he really was a ruthless murderer, he would eliminate Miss Norris on the spot.
You’re looking at my neck. Are you thinking of strangling me?
No, if he were going to kill Miss Norris, he would bash her over the head with the brass poker with which she was shuffling the red-hot coals in the grate.
God, he needed to get out of this claustrophobic room.
“Thank you, you’ve been most helpful,” he said.
She really had. “And now I really must be on my way. Criminals to catch, justice to serve and so on.”
He had almost made it to Miss Norris’s front door when she said, “Oh, Inspector—can I give you something? Can you just wait there a moment?”
Miss Norris was very slow, but eventually she snailed her way back, holding a yellow duster.
The duster was wrapped around something, like a present.
“I found this a few days ago, someone must have dropped it on the stairs on their way out. It looks quite valuable. Someone will be missing it, don’t you think? ”
She opened the duster and held it out to show Flynn the contents. “It would be safer with you, Inspector. I expect you have a Lost Property down at your station.”
“Yes, indeed we do,” he said, taking the soft yellow duster and its precious contents from Miss Norris and putting it in his pocket.
“Oh, thank you, Inspector. If someone comes looking for it, I’ll tell them you have it.”
—
He abandoned any idea of revisiting Delphine’s flat and instead caught an almost empty bus at Piccadilly, climbed up to the top deck, took a seat at the front and lit a cigarette.
He rather hoped that some kind of reverse alchemy might have occurred while the duster had been in his pocket—gold into base metal—but when he took it out again it was the same.
A gold watch, the fob still attached, and on the back two stags rampant holding their heraldic shield.
Veritas et Fides. Truth and Loyalty. The rallying cry of the Badgleys of Badgley Hall.
Badger? We need to have a word.”
“Of course, Flynn. What about? You look serious.”