Chapter 11 Like a House on Fire #3
“No, Dad, you don’t understand. It’s highly respectable. One of the men is married, and the other is a widower. And I’ll be sharing a whole floor with another girl, a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. I had tea with her. Her name’s Sadie, she’s terribly nice.”
“This girl,” said Mr. Taylor, “what does her father do?”
Mina didn’t miss a beat. “He’s very high up at Peek Freans.
” He supervised the Twiglets and Cheeselets production lines at the Bermondsey factory, apparently, which wasn’t not high up.
“Mrs. Wilson is particular about her houseguests—that’s what she calls them.
She’d never give the time of day to any riffraff.
When she interviewed me, she was wearing a gold necklace from Boucheron.
I’ve seen it in their window on New Bond Street. Dad, it’s a real chance for me.”
For a long time, Mina was intimidated by Honor’s hoity-toity manner, while also hoping to effortlessly acquire it.
Now, thinking of the way she looked down her nose—well, she had no bloody right.
And if she’d shoved a murderer in among them without so much as a by your leave, she had even less bloody right.
For all their sakes, but especially Saul’s, Mina resolved to find out the truth about Jimmy.
Like Deanna Durbin in Lady on a Train, she would carry the day with bravery and good cheer, outwitting her opponents and vanquishing villains.
Mina knocked on the office door and stuck her head in. “Hullo, Robbie. Isn’t Honor here?”
“She’s out for the evening, I think. Wining and dining someone who’s going to advertise. Come in, what’s up?”
“Nothing,” said Mina, who’d heard Honor leave the house.
“I just wanted to offer these around.” She held a plate of cupcakes.
“I made them to celebrate eggs coming off the ration, but it’ll be murder on my figure if I scoff them all.
I tried to give some to Greta, but you’d think I’d offered her a cup of poison.
I’m meant to have read her mind and known about her two new root canals.
I said, ‘Spare me the details, please. If you don’t want any, I’m sure Robbie will.
’ ” She placed the plate on his desk, then pulled over a chair and sat down.
“You can take a break, can’t you?” She had prepared these lines, having decided that Robbie was the obvious entry point to her investigation.
Robbie helped himself to a cake. “I’ve been flat out,” he said. “It’s just nonstop, you know. And does anyone appreciate all my hard work? Do they hell.”
“Poor you.” She smiled sympathetically. “How are things otherwise? It sounds like you’ve been getting on like a house on fire with our new resident. Must be nice to have a friend in the house. Another bloke near your age, I mean.”
He chewed a mouthful and swallowed. “How do you mean, like a house on fire? I wouldn’t say we were—”
“My bedroom’s right underneath his, that’s all. So I’ve heard you talking at night and stuff. I don’t mean I’ve been eavesdropping! I think it’s nice. Me and George are friendly enough, but I wouldn’t call us bosom pals.”
Robbie stared at her uneasily. “Yes, well. We’re very different people, he and I, and I suppose it means we can have some interesting conversations.”
“Look,” said Mina, “can I be honest? There something about him I don’t trust. Can’t even put my finger on it. I’ve just got the feeling he isn’t who he says he is. I mean, do you know if his name’s really Jimmy Sullivan?”
Robbie thought about this. “I’ve no reason to suspect otherwise. After all, Honor’s known him nearly his whole life, hasn’t she? So that must be his name.”
“Has he told you much about Honor? Stories from before we knew her, I mean?”
“No, she’s barely come up. We mainly—”
“Have you ever seen anything with his name on? A driver’s license, say, or ID card?”
She was making him feel increasingly nervous, though he was loath to show it. “Now, why would I? I’m not his employer.”
“Sorry I spoke,” she said huffily. She had thought of Robbie as a highly intelligent man, with his Cambridge degree and everything.
Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe all the learning in the world couldn’t teach you how people tick.
“Here,” she said, to leave things on a conciliatory note, “take another cake for later.”
Carefully shutting the office door behind her, Mina wondered if she dared poke around in Honor’s bedroom. Aside from wanting to gather intelligence, she was deeply curious to see her private sanctum, which by unspoken rule was off-limits. Glancing over her shoulder, she tiptoed down the hallway.
The room was in virtual darkness, but switching on the electric light revealed an unmade bed and clothes not put away.
How very slovenly. But what did you expect, with her upbringing?
Mina’s own room was organized with obsessive precision, each coat hanger the same width apart on the wardrobe rail, her underclothes folded and arranged by color in lavender-scented, wallpaper-lined drawers.
Floor-length greenish-blue curtains, either shot silk or a decent imitation, were tightly drawn.
A wooden drying rack was draped with stockings and unmentionables, some that wanted mending or, frankly, throwing away.
(There were no brassieres. Being all but breastless, thought Mina, must save Honor a fair few bob.
Mina was saving up for an individually designed corselette from Rigby & Peller, making do in the meantime with Marks & Spencer’s small cup size.) The crumpled eiderdown matched the curtains, and the padded headboard was a vivid tropical print satin.
Mina saw the effect being aimed at, but the colors were too garish a mix.
In her opinion a muted stripe or a check would look more modern against the wallpaper, which was mauve with a silverish repeating abstract pattern.
“The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint,” advised Elsie de Wolfe.
Mina had studied the life and works of this American interior designer, who cleverly married a lord solely to become a lady.
She never lived with her husband, instead building her own fortune and sharing her homes (plural, naturally) with her female companion.
If only there were classes on how to follow this exact path, thought Mina.
She considered the rather gimcrack dressing table, painted white and silver and cluttered with cosmetics: spilled boxes of powder, well-used bullets of lipstick, grimy palettes of eyeshadows with only crumbs left, jars of face cream, four or five bottles of scent.
A black lacquered bedside table held nothing but a green glass dish, shaped like a lily pad and streaked with cigarette ash.
Mina sat on the edge of the bed and slid open the single drawer.
It contained pill bottles, handkerchiefs, and a hardback novel: The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer.
On the cover, a man in tight breeches and horse-riding boots, a black leather crop in his hand, leaned unsmilingly against a tree.
Perhaps Honor wasn’t such a cold fish in secret.
Although Mina wasn’t sure she believed the stories about her and Saul.
Apart from the distastefulness of the idea, Honor’s poor husband had barely met his maker when Sadie reckoned Saul was her fancy man.
Realizing she’d been in the room for some minutes, Mina walked over to the door and listened out for footsteps.
Hearing none, she opened the mirrored wardrobe.
She longed to rifle through the dresses and coats, but there was no time.
Behind some hatboxes on an upper shelf, she spied a cracked brown leather portfolio, the kind carried by art students.
Glad of her platform shoes, she reached in to grab it and tugged at the brass zip pull, expecting it to be stiff.
But the teeth parted without the slightest resistance, revealing a mess of papers: marriage certificates, letters from the London County Council about rules for multiple dwellings, demands from the Inland Revenue Department, a war widow’s pension book, old National Insurance cards.
The only item Mina paused on was a birth certificate for someone called John Joseph, born on March 21, 1924, to Aisling Morag Shaughnessy and Conor Andrew Shaughnessy.
The headings—name, surname, and dwelling place of father, and so on—were printed in English and another language, too.
Mina was baffled until she realized it was an Irish birth certificate: the unfamiliar words with accents over the vowels were Irish Gaelic.
Had Honor’s brother been born in Ireland?
Not that it confirmed or ruled out that John—Jack, as he presumably became—was Jimmy.
And this, reflected Mina, was the only goal.
At half past eight the next morning, Mina found the kitchen in an atmosphere of high drama.
Honor was reading aloud from a newspaper to gasps and shudders from her audience of Saul, Jimmy, and Robbie.
“Oh, Mina,” she said, putting down the Daily Express.
“They’ve found four dead women at that house in Rillington Place. ”
“What does the Mirror say?” asked Jimmy as Mina sat down.
“A nationwide hunt,” read Honor, “is on for clues to the identity of the Bluebeard of Notting Hill—the killer who strangled four brunettes and hid their bodies in a shabby flatlet in West London.” At the word brunettes, Mina emitted a yelp and patted her hair, as though the killer might suddenly appear and drag her away.
Honor scanned the rest of the article. “It says three of the women were aged between seventeen and twenty-five. They were found half dressed or only in underclothes. None of them has been identified, but there’s a possibility that the fourth body, an older woman, is the wife of John Christie.
He’s the man who lived at the house for fifteen years, but recently moved out. ”
Robbie put down his spoon, no longer hungry for his porridge.
“So that poor young fellow who hanged for the murder of his daughter, on Christie’s evidence, and was accused of murdering his wife in that same house—are they now saying he was innocent?
He could hardly keep murdering from beyond the grave, could he? ”
“What was his name, that fellow?” asked Mina. “He was an Irishman, wasn’t he?”
“Timothy Evans,” said Robbie.
“Yeah, I thought he was a Welshman,” said Jimmy.
“That’s right,” said Mina. “The Irish aren’t generally the murdering sort, are they?”
Honor looked up from her newspaper. “I don’t know that the poor man’s birthplace is relevant if he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.” She squinted at the page. “Wait, no, it says the police have ruled out a connection between those murders and these ones.”
“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” said Robbie. “Otherwise it means admitting an innocent man was sent to his death.” He turned to Jimmy. “See, this is what I mean about capital punishment. Justice is too fallible.”
“Maybe they were accomplices,” said Jimmy. “That’s why the killings continued.” Or maybe, he thought, Timothy Evans had been dragged into a situation he didn’t understand, had been taken over by a stronger personality. He had the mind of a child, or so it was said.
Seeing Mina’s stricken face, Saul said, “Let us leave the speculation to the police. A terrible business all around, in any case.”
“It’s not far from here, either, Rillington Place.” Jimmy caught Honor’s eye, which sharply conveyed, You’re meant to be new to London, remember? “From what I gather,” he added.
“Oh, it’s miles and miles away,” said Honor. “It’s a slummy area. A different world, really. You mustn’t worry, Mina. Anyway, they’ll catch the man soon, you’ll see.”
She stared at Honor. Those poor girls, she thought. Strangled and discarded like rubbish, their final moments unspeakably terrifying.
Jimmy smiled kindly at her, as if to endorse Honor’s reassuring remark, but Mina couldn’t bring herself to smile back.