Murder of a Movie Star Read online

  Murder of a Movie Star

  -A Posie Parker Mystery-

  L.B. Hathaway

  WHITEHAVEN MAN PRESS

  London

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Whitehaven Man Press, London

  Copyright © L.B. Hathaway 2017

  (http://www.lbhathaway.com, email: [email protected])

  The moral right of the author, L.B. Hathaway, has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, or specifically mentioned in the Historical Note at the end of this publication, are fictitious and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Sale or provision of this publication by any bookshop, retailer or e-book platform or website without the express written permission of the author is in direct breach of copyright and the author’s moral rights, and such rights will be enforced legally. Thank you for respecting the author’s rights.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (e-book:) 978-0-9955694-0-9

  ISBN (paperback:) 978-0-9955694-1-6

  Jacket illustration by Red Gate Arts.

  Formatting and design by J.D. Smith.

  For Heidi

  By L.B. Hathaway

  The Posie Parker Mystery Series

  1. Murder Offstage: A Posie Parker Mystery

  2. The Tomb of the Honey Bee: A Posie Parker Mystery

  3. Murder at Maypole Manor: A Posie Parker Mystery

  4. The Vanishing of Dr Winter: A Posie Parker Mystery

  5. Murder of a Movie Star: A Posie Parker Mystery

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by L.B.Hathaway

  Prologue

  PART ONE (Wednesday 25th July, 1923)

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  PART TWO (Thursday 26th July, 1923)

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  PART THREE (The Wrap)

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Thanks for joining Posie Parker and her friends

  Historical Note

  A Short Note on British Silent Movies and Movie Stars in 1923

  Acknowledgements and Further Reading

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The girl was lying in the tiny, dim dressing room, flopped over her chair.

  She was face-down, dangling, a blonde and plaited wig covering her whole head. Her arms hung, flailing. She looked like she had drowned and been pulled from the sea.

  The movie star had obviously been dead for some time.

  ‘Have a good look around, Posie, but don’t touch anything,’ said Chief Inspector Lovelace to Posie Parker, Private Detective, in a muted whisper. They stood on the edge of the doorway to the room.

  ‘Tell me what you think. I’d never met Miss Hanro, but you met her only yesterday. I’ll keep this pack of bloodhounds at bay.’ He indicated with a flick of the thumb behind him to where the Scotland Yard Forensics team, headed up by Mr Maguire, were getting ready to do their thing.

  It was very early in the morning, not yet eight o’clock, but it was boiling hot already. Dr Poots, the Police Pathologist, was standing outside in the glass corridor, looking considerably put out. Posie tried to avoid his gaze but she caught the furious scowl on his square doglike face and he brandished his grim black bag at her like a threat.

  Posie forced herself to concentrate.

  Something was wrong here. Horribly so. Personally, she felt dreadful: she had been entrusted with protecting this girl’s life, and she had failed. But that wasn’t what was wrong: it was more than that.

  She had a strong sense of the presence of evil in the small dressing room. Posie could almost sniff at it, along with the horrible and unglamorous stink of death.

  ‘Go on, she’s not exactly going to bite, is she? Step in further.’

  Posie walked further into the room. It looked exactly the same as yesterday when she had sat here chatting away to the movie star Silvia Hanro, when her friend Dolly, Lady Cardigeon, had sat drinking champagne and smoking her usual purple cocktail cigarettes. There was the same mess of cosmetics on the desk; the same pitcher of water on the low nest of tables; the same spray of red orchids in a vase, giving off their sickly-sweet smell. Her eyes took in the small ice-box in the corner of the room, and Posie shuddered and quickly looked away.

  Silvia Hanro was wearing the same emerald-green kimono Posie had seen her in yesterday out on the lawn. A plain glass was turned over near the girl’s outstretched hand, but it was impossible to say if anything had been in it, as the intense heat in the room had dried up anything there might have been. There were certainly no stains visible on the small, bright carpet.

  ‘No obvious cause of death, sir,’ said Posie, circling the body. ‘No stab marks, or shot wounds visible from here. But of course, I’m not allowed to turn her over, am I?’

  The Chief Inspector shook his head.

  ‘Something feels odd here, though,’ he said, scowling.

  ‘It does, sir. I don’t like it.’

  And then Posie saw it. A gold thick band wrapped around the movie star’s left-hand ring finger. But it wasn’t a ring made of precious gold. It was made of tin foil.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.

  And then Posie saw something else. Just beneath the kimono. A flash of colour. ‘Hold your horses!’ she gasped.

  ‘This is worse than we thought.’

  ****

  24 HOURS EARLIER…

  PART ONE

  (Wednesday 25th July, 1923)

  One

  ‘What on earth is that horrible thing?’

  Lady Cardigeon, or, as she would always be known to Posie Parker, plain old Dolly Price, had just picked up a great grey scraggle of wool, out of which two very large knitting needles protruded at funny angles.

  ‘It’s a jumper, you noddle,’ said Posie Parker sourly, wiping the sweat from her brow.

  It was very hot and stuffy up in the Grape Street Bureau, Posie’s Detective Agency in Bloomsbury, London. The clock was striking one o’clock, and Posie was hungry for lunch. To make matters worse, it was the hottest summer on record, and every sticky minute felt like an eternity.

  ‘I’m trying to knit it for Alaric’s birthday in two weeks’ time. I wanted to replace his favourite jumper which I ruined last New Year. The trouble is, I’m not having much luck with the pattern. I keep getting lost. I never was much good at knitting, if truth
be told.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ Dolly said glibly, bending her shorn bleached-white head over the mess of wool. She started to unpick quite a bit, her slight, small hands moving furiously, her bare feet propped up on a wheel of a great double Silver Cross pram.

  ‘I’d stick to solving mysteries if I were you, lovey. Much easier. Besides, it’s the middle of July! Why on earth are you makin’ him such a heavy knitted monstrosity? Shall we get a cab and nip over to Harrods and buy somethin’ suitable instead? Some little thing he can actually wear, I mean? Or did you want him to die of heatstroke?’

  Dolly threw a quick, inquisitive glance over at her friend.

  ‘What’s happenin’ with you two, anyhow? Still gettin’ married?’

  Posie scowled and stared momentarily at the large pink stone which glittered on her left-hand ring finger as if to check it was still there. In truth she didn’t know the answer to Dolly’s unwelcome question and it gnawed at her. She was in a fragile mood and the day had started badly.

  Posie had woken from a bad dream in which Alaric had been trying to break some bad news to her, and the sense of foreboding which the dream had carried had been hard to shake off. She kept trying to forget the image of Alaric, leaning over her, trying to wake her, then disappearing in the haze of the dream. But she couldn’t forget his ominous words:

  ‘Look, darling, there’s something I need to tell you. Quite urgently.’

  ‘Bad news? It must be. What is it?’

  Having woken up, Posie had then dressed in a particularly vibrant shade of yellow, as if to cheer herself up, and had regretted it ever since. In fact, the colour was giving her a headache. To make matters worse, on her way into work she had heard the cheery trills of the still-popular song, ‘The Wedding Glide’, blaring out of a small café and this had soured her mood even more.

  Dolly carried on, less certainly now:

  ‘I know we haven’t seen each other in an age, but I thought you were goin’ to be havin’ a quick wedding earlier this year, but you haven’t mentioned it lately. All okay, is it, lovey?’

  Posie winced. ‘Everything’s fine. But it’s rather difficult to get married when one of you is never in the country. Alaric’s been in Morocco for the last two months, he’s coming back for his birthday. I can’t really say anything else on the subject, so please don’t push me. You’re right: let’s nip out, shall we?’

  Secretly she was rather relieved that time had been called on what had turned out to be rather a frustrating project and she grabbed at her vivid yellow cloche hat and her beloved old carpet bag, which didn’t match, but who gave a hang?

  Dolly and Posie had just started to manoeuvre the giant black pram towards the stairway to carry it downstairs when right at that very moment the twins, the Honourable Ladies Bunny and Trixie Cardigeon, decided to wake up and simultaneously exercise their one-year-old vocal chords. To great effect.

  ‘Oh, lawks!’ Dolly said, staring at the twins wide-eyed. ‘They’ve only just been fed. What little horrors! What on earth do I do now?’

  ‘No idea,’ Posie said unhelpfully. ‘Should I pick one of them up? Would that help?’

  Dolly shrugged her tiny shoulders unenthusiastically and looked like she might burst into tears herself.

  ‘My gosh! Why the blazes did you send those paid nannies away, Dolly? Where are they now? Killing time over in Covent Garden, shopping?’

  ‘I don’t like them,’ Dolly harrumphed, struggling with the unwieldy pram. ‘They’re new, and I know they snoop. Rufus says they’re the best of the best, but I feel like I’m bein’ spied upon. This weighs a ton! How are we goin’ to manage?’

  ‘Exactly. We could be doing with those women now. We only got it up here with their help. It’s a four-woman job. I never saw arms like theirs before! More navvy than nanny, if you ask me. Oh, golly!’

  Dolly’s little daughters were getting louder and louder by the second and were by now very red in the face. Posie thought disloyally that they were most unattractive-looking, even though they were dressed in the height of current baby fashion. In fact, although she forbore to mention it to Dolly, at that very moment they looked a good deal like their grandfather, the Earl of Cardigeon, whose resemblance to an angry toad was most striking.

  Just then, and as luck would have it, Len Irving, Posie’s partner in the Detective Agency at Grape Street, came up the stairs carrying a huge industrial metal fan. He took one look at the two women and came bounding up.

  ‘What’s wrong with the two of you?’ he said, rolling his eyes heavenwards, grabbing the pram and wheeling it backwards and forwards on the tiny blue-carpeted landing. The babies immediately stopped crying.

  ‘They want movement. Works with our Alfred every night. Sometimes I put him in the pram and wheel him up and down the streets of Leytonstone to get him to sleep.’

  ‘You don’t feel like lookin’ after them for me, do you?’ implored Dolly, her painted eyes widening in desperation. Even Len could see that tears were not far off.

  ‘Where are you two off to, then?’ said Len placidly, raising an eyebrow. ‘And for how long?’

  ‘We’ll be quick,’ said Posie certainly. ‘One hour, maximum.’

  It was true: they could make Knightsbridge and back in an hour. Just.

  ‘Can you manage in the office with the babies? Without Prudence, I mean?’

  Prudence Smythe, their first-class secretary, was away on her annual summer holidays in Ramsgate with her mother for two weeks, and they had hired a temporary secretary called Tess who seemed barely able to take the very few telephone calls which came through. Posie had already given up on the girl.

  ‘’Course I can manage!’ Len was a shadower, and known for being excellent at his job: he worked for several lawyers, trailing errant husbands, and occasionally wives, trying to get hold of photographic evidence of extra-marital hanky-panky in order to bring divorce proceedings. It was grubby work, but lucrative.

  Len laughed aloud. ‘Your timing’s perfect: I’m enjoying all of my clients being out of town in this heat. Come next week, I’m going to be rushed off my feet. Don’t know how I’ll cope, actually.’

  Posie shuffled Dolly quickly off down the stairs, giving Len a backwards look laden with meaning.

  ‘Thank you. It’s very important,’ she assured him.

  ‘It always is!’ replied Len ruefully.

  ****

  As they emerged out onto Grape Street both Posie and Dolly gasped at the heat.

  The pavement was almost melting beneath their feet and the dry grit from the London plane trees danced in the hot air. Despite the shade of the little street, no-one was about. Not even for a cigarette. It was just too hot. The whole month of July had been swelteringly hot, and filled with sudden thunderstorms, the like of which no-one had ever seen before.

  The childish euphoria they had felt at running away from Len and the babies evaporated instantly in the heat. Even the man selling sherbert and water from a small cart on the corner had packed up for the day. Even the beggars had found somewhere cooler to sit.

  ‘Golly. It’s yonks since we had a summer like this one,’ muttered Posie, wiping the sweat from her brow with the end of her bright lemon-coloured linen jacket sleeve. Most of her clothes these days were made by the House of Harlow, the best designers in town, and today was no exception. The clothes were ridiculously expensive but they normally felt wonderful. Today, however, she felt like an over-large, over-dressed canary. Posie took a small bottle of Parma Violet perfume from her bag and squirted herself with it liberally.

  ‘Last time it was this hot I think I was still in Norfolk. Living with my father. So that would make it…’

  ‘Nineteen fifteen!’ chipped in Dolly triumphantly. They had reached the junction with Shaftesbury Avenue and were waiting on the corner for a motor taxi, scanning the main road hopefully. But the street was empty, and there was only one rag-and-bone man riding listlessly up and down on his cart, led by a thirsty-looking horse.
They started to walk up the empty street in the direction of Oxford Street.

  ‘How come you remember the year so clearly, Dolly?’

  Dolly’s face brightened. ‘Can’t forget it, lovey. It was the year I went out to nurse in the war, in France. And lawks, were we fryin’ up here in town beforehand. It was hot right up to September. We used to go and sit and watch the movies at the cinema, on an endless loop, just to stay cool. I must have seen Mark Paris in the same film at least twenty times. Not that I’m complainin’ of course: the man was the nearest thing to God that the cinema had. The best of the best.’

  Dolly lit a purple cocktail cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Just like this, it was. But worse, as there were Zeppelin raids goin’ on. Why, did you know, I was nearly killed when a Zeppelin landed on Red Lion Square, at the Dolphin pub, not far from here, just a few days before I left town…’

  ‘No, I don’t think I knew that. My gosh, that must have been awful for you.’

  Dolly flicked the ash from her cigarette absent-mindedly, staying silent, lost in her memories. She resumed quietly:

  ‘All of us nurses who had been called up were glad to get the summons to Folkestone and get right out of London. So we all enjoyed the sea breeze for a day or two before boarding the boat out. I’ll never forget the thousands of men lined up all along the Road of Remembrance, gettin’ sunburn as they waited for a passage. Poor devils. Blimey! A lifetime ago! Those were the days…’

  Posie raised an eyebrow and stole a sideways glance at her friend. She had never heard Dolly speak about her time in the Great War with anything other than sadness and horror; certainly not as a time to hark back to.

  Posie was a bit worried about Dolly: she hadn’t seemed quite her colourful self since the arrival of the twins the year before. She often seemed unhappy. Dazed. As if all the light had gone out of her.

  Come to think of it, Posie realised that Dolly looked like she was wasting away, which was rotten news, as she had been tiny – just a slip of a thing – to begin with. Her clothes were positively hanging off her. But Posie forced herself to stay quiet, biding her time, waiting for the right moment to speak.