Chapter 21 The Dome of Discovery #2
Flynn had spotted Mrs. Betty trotting purposefully towards him, weaving her way through a forest of human legs, propelled by her jaunty tail. No Veronica accompanying her, though there was someone he hadn’t been expecting to see.
“Leonora!”
“Hello, duckie. I was hoping we’d bump into you.
I wanted to introduce you to Freddie here.
” She was in the company of a man who, like most of her “gentlemen,” was middle-aged and balding, but in this case the man had the sheen of money on him.
As did Leonora, Flynn noticed. She was all decked out in new shoes, expensive clothes, an extravagant hat, very much like someone who’d undergone a reversal of fortune.
“This is Mr. Temple,” she said. “Mr. Fred Temple. This is my neighbour, Mr. Flynn, Freddie.” The man gave a little bow and shook hands with Flynn.
“He’s got kind eyes, hasn’t he?” Leonora said to Flynn. She shielded her mouth and said in a loud stage whisper, “And pots of money.” Fred Temple laughed good-naturedly. “One of my most loyal customers.”
“Where on earth have you been, Leonora?”
“The south coast—Paignton, Torquay, Dawlish. Lovely little holiday.”
“Dawlish?”
“Yes, duckie, do you know it?”
“Only from books. Mr. Rakowski was sick with worry about you.”
“Oh, he’ll get over it,” she said, surprisingly callous. Mr. Rakowski and Romilly Street were part of a past she’d left behind. Perhaps there was a lesson for Flynn in that. Pastures new, rather than the old memory lane.
“Freddie’s recently retired,” Leonora said.
“He was in ladies’ undergarments.” She slapped her thigh like a pantomime boy.
“You can’t help but laugh at that, can you?
Not in travelling, not a salesman. Owns a factory.
Proper businessman. This country’s done with.
We’re going to live in warmer climes, Mr. Flynn—South Africa.
Sunshine on tap. Domestics to wait on me hand and foot.
Tying the knot before we go, Freddie got a special licence.
” She wriggled her left hand the better to display the large ruby she was sporting on her ring finger.
“Your old stablemate Mitzi Blinkhorn is giving a demonstration of the Festival Cake over in Homes and Gardens.”
“Ada Clegg? Oh, we’ll have to go and say hello. Remind her about the good old days.”
“She’d love that, I expect. Well, I wish you all the best, Leonora.
And you, Mr. Temple. Must rush off, sorry.
” Because there, ferreting his way nimbly through the crowds, was Flynn’s own undead ghost. Arthur Stamp, the man who Flynn was supposed to have stabbed to death and who was clearly very much alive.
He had stopped to talk to someone. Not just someone.
Lydia. She was in her Nell Gwyn costume, her basket of oranges on one arm, and had been interrupted in the middle of her siren sing-song, “Come all, come buy my wares, kind people. Who’ll buy my wares?
” Everything was a disguise with Lydia. Even naked in bed with him she’d been playing a part.
Flynn took cover behind a cigarette kiosk to spy on the pair of them.
There was nothing hostile in their encounter, in fact it looked friendly, two people who knew each other.
Old ak-qwaint-unsses. After a few moments they said their farewells, Lydia giving Stamp an orange and patting him on the back as if she were setting a faithful pony free.
Flynn watched as a small boy ran up to her, eagerly proffering a sixpence that was exchanged for an orange from her basket. She was all charm. Once the boy had gone on his way, clutching his orange, Flynn approached her.
“Can’t get away from you, can I, Flynn? You look grim—what’s up?”
“We have to talk, Lydia. Don’t brush me off.”
Maybe something in his tone struck her, because she sighed irritably and said, “If we really must have this conversation, can we find somewhere less public to have it?”
“The whole place is public—that’s the point of it.
” He was struck by an idea. “We could go into one of the Parlours. They’re being boarded up, but you can get in at the back.
” On the way he noticed the surreptitious—and not-so-surreptitious—glances that Lydia’s “embonpoint” attracted from the men they passed.
“I’d like to get my hands on that pair of oranges,” he overheard a man murmur to his male companion, not far enough out of the earshot of his wife to prevent him from being swiped by the Festival Guide in her hand.
“Here,” Flynn said, choosing the first Parlour they came across.
The rough boards were already in place, so that the only light was what had managed to filter through the gaps between them.
The shadowy interior felt suitably clandestine, but in contrast to their surroundings Flynn gestured to a large, overstuffed sofa and said, “Have a seat, why don’t you?
” like a dutiful suburban host. Mrs. Betty jumped up on an armchair and fell asleep immediately, while Lydia took a wary perch on the sofa (Ernest Race Ltd, 22 Union Road, London SW4).
The furniture and ornaments were yet to be removed from the Parlour, and Lydia said, “I feel as though we’re entombed with our grave goods in here. Like the Egyptian pharaohs in their pyramids.”
“Not like you to be fanciful, Lydia. And also, by the way, although not really by the way at all, I’ve just seen Arthur Stamp, or whatever his name is, a man who yesterday the police accused me of murdering yet who seems to be very much alive, chatting away with you like an old pal.
Arthur Stamp’s your man, isn’t he? That’s why he stole the photographs from me. For you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be coy. You know it doesn’t suit you.”
“Do stop telling me what I’m not, Flynn.”
“It’s because I have no idea what you are, Lydia.”
“I’m a faithful servant of the Crown.”
She lit a cigarette but didn’t offer him one. Instead she blew one of her perfect smoke rings and slowly contemplated the way it hung above her head like an unholy halo.
“Now I’m thinking of strangling you,” Flynn said.
After some unnecessarily aggrieved sighing on her part, Lydia said, “All right, all right. You understand, Flynn, that everything I’m about to tell you is covered—de facto—by the Official Secrets Act? You can’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“Did you kill Delphine? The Security Service?”
“We don’t go around murdering people.”
“I’m pretty sure that you do.”
“You asked me before if we were protecting Dangerfield, but quite the opposite is true. The plan from on high was to discredit him before the next election.”
“The snap election that seems to have been planned months in advance?”
“Well, that’s nothing to do with me, but yes. ‘We’ didn’t kill Miss Dubois, because that would have been biting the hand that was about to feed us, but seeing as we had a body we took the opportunity to make it useful. What we did was take a bad hand and play it well.”
“What hand? What game, Lydia?”
From the next-door Parlour came the sound of hammering. Mrs. Betty lifted one ear and then let it drop. “The barbarians knocking on the gate,” Lydia murmured. “They’ll never go away.”
“It’s just a workman, not the collapse of the Roman Empire. Are you all right? You sound like you’re losing the plot, Lydia. Too many plates spinning in the air? Some are bound to fall and break, aren’t they?”
A little toss of her head. She tucked back a stray lock of hair. There were modest pearls in her ears today. They matched the pearls around her neck. A garotte, Flynn thought. Except that the pearls would break and scatter before she could be choked with them.
“Go on,” he prompted.
“The Powers That Be wanted to clean the house before there was any chance of a resurgence of Dangerfield’s particular kind of canker.
He has a certain magnetism. It attracts supporters, stirs up trouble.
The country doesn’t need that right now.
We’re a long way from recovery from the war, we need dull stability—or stable dullness, if you prefer. A steady hand on the tiller.
“The idea was a simple one—to disgrace him in the eyes of the electorate. Delphine was to be given a choice—sing like a canary about Dangerfield or be shipped back off over la Manche to a welcome committee composed of her old Resistance pals.”
“So, expose Dangerfield as a wartime traitor? That was the plan?”
She shrugged. “That was more of a bonus, to be honest. Nobody cares much any more about what was done in the war. Nor does the citizenry care much about spies, but they do love a tawdry sexual affair. You can imagine the scandalous headlines in the press, especially if those photographs were in the mix and the case went to court. Did you look at them, by the way? Mitzi Blinkhorn and Giles Dangerfield in their birthday suits—grisly stuff, eh? Those snaps were the icing on the cake and we needed them in the right hands. Our hands.”
“You can’t know that it’s Dangerfield in the photographs.”
Lydia laughed. “He has, I am reliably and fortuitously informed, a distinguishing mark on his more intimate parts. It would be interesting to see it being proved. We knew Delphine was blackmailing both Dangerfield and your Major with the photographs. She was a threat to both of them. One bird, two stones. Your Major had only his wife at stake if they got out into the public domain; Dangerfield had everything to lose. His reputation, his marriage, his status, his money, his future. We grew worried when we realized that one of Dangerfield’s old adjutants—Braithwaite—was keeping his beady eye on Delphine.
Both your Major and Dangerfield used to use him for all kinds of dirty work before the war.
We didn’t want him disposing of Dangerfield’s troublesome mistress before she’d opened her beak.
We needed her alive, not dead. Dead canaries are no use to anyone except coal miners. ”
“She told me that she was being watched,” Flynn said, “but I didn’t believe her. So what went wrong?”