1 Murder Offstage Read online

  Posie shook her head, and stared into his eyes. She was almost convinced he was telling the truth now. She was also conscious of her hand, still in his. His strong touch. His desire to make everything right between them.

  ‘She bought the whole bucket of roses herself! Bless the chap, he couldn’t believe his luck! But everyone in the queue at the fish and chip stall was staring and whispering, and giving me evil looks. One woman even shouted out “What sort of fella makes a lady buy her own roses on Valentine’s Day?” Well, I swear I flushed as red as the roses. And then Babe carted them around all night long. Making a spectacle of herself. She was half-cut by the time we reached the theatre, so I took the tickets from her so as not to lose them. I was embarrassed. She was making eyes at all the other fellows in the queue by this time, and I was on the point of running off, getting away from her, when I suddenly saw you. I couldn’t believe my eyes!’

  He clasped her hand tighter. ‘I swear to you Po, when I saw you there I almost died. I could only imagine what it looked like. With all my heart I wanted to come with you, to explain. I would have jumped in the cab with you like a shot.’

  ‘Why didn’t you, then?’

  ‘I couldn’t leave her there, in that state, alone. How could I? A minute later it was all over, anyway.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She spewed up all over the red carpet, and some poor beggar in charge of the programmes had to come out and clean up the vomit. I put her in a taxi and then I headed home myself.’

  ‘You didn’t want to see the play?’

  ‘Not on your life! Not after what you’d told me a few weeks ago.’

  Len took her hand in both of his:

  ‘Can you forgive me? Say you understand.’

  Posie nodded. Her office was very still. There was just the clanging sound of the typewriter coming from the outside office.

  ‘There’s something funny about our Miss Sinclair,’ she whispered softly. ‘I think she may have been placed here, that she’s watching us somehow. She’s deliberately trying to cause trouble, sabotaging my work. I think she’s a phoney.’

  Len raised his eyebrow questioningly.

  ‘I was beginning to think the same thing. But look, let’s not talk about that now. She’s just a silly girl. Actually, there’s something I’d like to do more than anything…’ and Posie almost jumped out of her skin as he kissed her hand, his eyes looking directly into hers.

  He leant across the desk in one fluid movement and came very close, his mouth just a fraction away from hers. She closed her eyes.

  His lips were suddenly on hers: a light fluttering feeling at first, like a wave of butterflies landing. Len leant further in, and there was an unrepentant yearning desire in the way he took her face in both his hands and started to kiss her passionately.

  She pulled away, suddenly chastened:

  ‘But what about your girlfriend…? We can’t…’

  ‘Shhh,’ he murmured, soothingly.

  It was not much of an answer but it was enough. Posie closed her eyes again and reached for him, as she had wanted to for almost two years.

  Just then came a fearsome knocking noise at the door.

  ****

  Seven

  Len and Posie jumped apart.

  The fragile glass door was sent banging backwards on its hinges with the force of a hurricane and as Len and Posie turned around they saw the Earl of Cardigeon and a sheepish-looking Rufus trooping in.

  ‘We didn’t know where else to come, old thing,’ said Rufus simply. There was a strain of desperation in his voice. ‘So we came here.’

  Posie smoothed her hair down and jumped up, offering the Earl her own seat. He took it without question, surveying the room with his beady eyes and saying nothing. He seemed tired. Rufus perched on the desk, an image of pure dejection. Len stayed where he was.

  ‘Tea?’ asked Posie, in as normal a tone as she could manage.

  ‘Got anything stronger?’ asked Rufus hopefully. She shook her head and went to get more cups. When she returned she found introductions had been made, and the Earl was busy smoking a fat cigar.

  ‘There’s something I’ve discovered, Nosy,’ Rufus whispered. ‘Something I need to tell you.’

  He cast his eyes down for a second and flushed red. He gave a sideways, ashamed glance at his father. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. He was shaking and sweaty, presumably from not having had a drink since yesterday.

  ‘Well?’

  He seemed to change his mind and shook his head. ‘No, it’s probably nothing. Don’t let’s worry about it. I just couldn’t stand hanging around in that awful club of my father’s for a minute longer, and he’s banned me from going back to the Ritz.’

  ‘Too right!’ puffed the Earl. ‘It’s too expensive by half! Our family has always had membership of No 11, St James and that’s where we stay when we’re in town, not at the Ritz Hotel. Especially now we’re seven hundred thousand pounds down! The police are a bunch of useless nincompoops, so we’ve come here. My son seems to set a lot of score by your supposed abilities, Miss Parker. So I thought you could keep us up to date with your progress.’

  The Earl spat out this last word sarcastically as a sort of challenge and he glared at Posie as if she should have come up with a solution by now.

  ‘I say, hang on a minute! I’m not sure if that’s entirely fair,’ started Len, rushing to Posie’s defence.

  ‘It’s fine, Len,’ Posie smiled. ‘No solutions yet, I’m afraid, sir,’ she said to the Earl, ‘but I do have several leads in the case.’

  She noticed the Earl was using the business card she had given him the night before as an ashtray and she smiled to herself wryly. She explained as briefly as possible about her eventful night the evening before, leaving nothing out. Except being followed to Pall Mall: they all had quite enough to be worrying about, she decided.

  Len let out a whistle at the end of her tale.

  With a final flourish Posie brought out the photo of Lucky Lucy from the depths of her carpet bag. Rufus shrieked and grabbed the photo, before being battered around the head by his father who snatched it and stared at it for a long time, grimacing.

  ‘So this is how I see it,’ Posie said authoritatively, summing-up.

  ‘First, we need to locate Lucky Lucy, sorry – Georgie. Then we can track the diamond, if she still has it, and also force her to admit to the police that Rufus had nothing to do with the shooting of Le Merle. Somehow, she’s linked to this mysterious La Luna club, and she could well be found hiding out there, lying low; she won’t be stupid enough to return to the theatre. So our next step is to find out where the nightclub is and when it’s next open. So far, it’s the only lead we have and we need to investigate it. I’ve already started asking around, but I draw the line at asking this Caspian della Rosa fellow for more information; he gave me the creeps, quite frankly. My betting is that he’s mixed up in this whole affair too.’

  The Earl let out something between a snort and a smoke-filled cough.

  ‘They’re not leads!’ he bellowed. ‘That’s all just hot air! Why on earth are you focusing on tracking down some willo’-the-wisp nightclub? What a waste of time!’

  Posie shook her head. ‘It’s interconnected, sir. I’m sure of it. If we find the nightclub, we find the girl.’

  Len glared at the Earl across the room.

  ‘Your Lordship,’ he said, not entirely deferentially, ‘one thing puzzles me in all of this mess. If the Maharajah diamond is worth so much, and forgive me, but you seem to need the money, why didn’t you just sell it? It seems strange to me that you left it mouldering away in a bank vault somewhere...’

  Rufus had covered his face in his hands.

  Len carried on, regardless. ‘There must be a market for such a stone, surely? There are rich foreigners crawling all over London right now, I’m sure one of them would be only too happy to snap it up. Or you could have sold it to a dealer, had it split up into smaller pieces? I do
n’t understand.’

  The Earl had gone redder than ever in the face. Rufus spoke up for the first time yet:

  ‘It’s tricky. It’s part of the Cardigeon legend. It cannot be sold. It’s part of a pact, a promise.’

  The Earl seemed to have calmed down somewhat. He nodded slowly in agreement. ‘Out of the question for it to be sold, but out of the question for it to be worn, too. My idiot son knew that. Safest place for it was in the bank.’

  ‘And was it out of the question for it to be insured, too, your Lordship?’ asked Len, innocently, provocatively. The Earl balled his fists up in fury but did not reply.

  Posie and Len looked at each other with a look of shared incredulous understanding: it was obvious to both of them now that the Earl was either harder up than he would have them imagine, or simply very, very tight, and that he had shifted the responsibility for paying the hefty insurance premiums onto Rufus as a way of lightening his own outgoings.

  The Earl got up and paced around. He stubbed out his cigar on Posie’s blackened business card and stood with his back to them all, looking out of the window at the pigeons. He had tucked his thumbs into the belt-loops on his smart town waistcoat, as if about to address an important congress. He sighed deeply.

  ‘I might as well tell you the whole ruddy story,’ he said puffily, his back still to them. ‘It’s quite frankly an unbelievable tale.’

  He was, much to their surprise, a very good storyteller…

  ****

  ‘It was 1858, and the Viceroy of India had just been appointed. He decided he couldn’t get around all of India on his own, so he organised for some of his pals to come out and help him.

  My great-grandfather, the Seventh Earl of Cardigeon, had known the Viceroy at school, and he jollied off out to India and became a Captain living in the beautiful little city-state of Gwilim. Not that Gwilim needed any real ruling, you understand. It was run very nicely indeed by the local Maharajah, who lived in a lovely white palace in lush green gardens where peacocks danced about merrily. Happily for the Seventh Earl, the Maharajah gave the grandest of parties, and my great-grandfather was having a high old time of it out there...

  Everyone was getting on awfully well together when the city was suddenly overun by rebels, hungry for change and ready to overthrow anyone who stood in their way. My great-grandfather led his men, alongside those of the Maharajah, in attacking the rebel army and for a few days the whole place was a living nightmare.

  Slowly, slowly, the rebels were defeated until there were just a few of them left, holed up in a great fortress on the hill overlooking the city.

  After two more days of bloody fighting, my great-grandfather found himself standing face-to-face with the last of the rebel soldiers.

  This last rebel was unarmed, and badly hurt, and offered to trade something precious with my great-grandfather in return for his life and his freedom. When the Seventh Earl asked what exactly he would trade, the rebel brought out a great glittering black-as-the-gates-of-hell diamond, the size of a quail’s egg. He told my great-grandfather that the rebel forces had broken into the Maharajah’s Treasury only days before and taken the prize piece.

  He told my grandfather that the diamond was famous throughout India for its beauty, but that no-one would wear it on account of a centuries-old curse it carried.

  “You may have it, sir,” said the rebel, “but know that it comes steeped in the blood of very many men. It is a very strong power.”

  My great-grandfather was a greedy sort of cove, and he pocketed the stone. Then he killed the rebel anyway: he didn’t believe the man and thought that he was probably being sold a dud; a desperate story told by a desperate man.

  It was only days later, at a banquet at the white palace to celebrate the end of the fighting, that the Seventh Earl casually mentioned that he had been told a story by a rebel about a stolen gemstone. He did not mention that he had actually been given the stone. He was surprised to notice that the whole table suddenly went quiet, and turned to him in silent horror.

  “Did you actually see this diamond, my Lord?” asked the Maharajah quietly. The Seventh Earl played dumb and said he had not.

  “And did the rebel say where it had ended up?” asked the Maharani, the beautiful young wife of the Maharajah. She seemed very scared. The Seventh Earl shook his head, and the whole table sighed in a sound very like despair. Or was it relief?

  “It is not so much its value, although it is priceless,” whispered the Maharajah to the Seventh Earl, “as its power. It is a thing destined to bring sorrow and despair to everyone who possesses it. Even for a very short time. It is a thing best kept locked up. My family have spent the last five hundred years guarding it here.”

  The very next day my great-grandfather packed his things up in a frantic hurry. He organised a berth on the next ship homebound to Southampton; he couldn’t get away fast enough from India or from the hospitable Maharajah.

  The diamond burnt a hole in his pocket the whole way home, and the very first thing he did on landing was head to Brigg & Brooks in London for a valuation. When he found out it really was priceless, my great-grandfather became like a man possessed. He carried the stone with him wherever he went; slept with it under his pillow at night.

  But he slowly went mad, poor beggar. He began thinking he was being followed – that the rebel he had shot in the fortress at Gwilim was haunting him around our great house at Rebburn Abbey; that the beautiful Maharani was coming to him at night, sobbing and wailing for her stone to be returned to her. He shot himself in the head a year to the day after he had come into possession of the thing.

  And then, unbelievably, it was the very same thing with my grandfather, the Eighth Earl.

  The jewel had been locked away, a good thing too, until the Eighth Earl had come of age: he was just twenty-four and was due to marry a lovely girl. He scoffed at the old story of the curse and decided to open the safe and to give the jewel to my grandmother as a wedding present. But when it actually came to it he couldn’t bring himself to give it away, not even to his wife. He wanted it all for himself. After the wedding the thing started to get at him. He found he couldn’t sleep anymore; he just sat in his study all night long, exhausted, fascinated by the thing, turning it over and over in his hands like a simpleton. Then he took to carrying it around with him in the daytime too, on a leather cord around his neck.

  At twenty-five he quite lost his head over it and hung himself from his study ceiling, still wearing the wretched thing on the cord around his neck. My pregnant grandmother found him. She decided enough was enough and locked it away again.

  Fortunately the pattern changed. My own father was a sensible sort of fellow, and capable of sorting out such messes. He decided to write to the then-Maharajah and tell him the whole story. It was 1899. He said he was willing to post the thing back to Gwilim, and he apologised profusely for what had happened.

  The Maharajah wrote back and said they had known all along that the stone had been stolen by the Seventh Earl, and that they had been relieved it was no longer under their watch.

  Together, the Maharajah and my father made a solemn pact that the stone should be kept locked up in a secure vault in London, and insured, unused and unworn; away from those who might be tempted by its powers...and it’s a pact I’ve been very happy to keep to. I myself have never touched the thing, never wanted to. I always instilled the importance of keeping it locked up in Rufus too.

  But it seems it may have been working its spell again lately...’

  ****

  ‘Pah!’ scoffed Len incredulously. ‘I don’t believe it! A physical object can’t have that much power! It’s unbelievable! It’s just a good old yarn.’

  Posie shook her head at him seriously. ‘No, Len. I believe it. Maybe not that the gem itself has power, but the fact that people are willing to believe in its story. Then they act accordingly. It’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes – people believe what they think they are supposed to.’

&
nbsp; ‘Anyway,’ said Len briskly, ‘what are you going to do with it if you get it back, sir?’

  The Earl shrugged. ‘Either lock it up again or insist we send it back to Gwilim. It is theirs rightfully, after all.’

  ‘Huh!’ laughed Len. ‘Although when you thought it had been stolen and there was a whole heap of insurance money about to fall into your lap, then it was yours to claim, rightfully, sir?’

  The Earl bristled and for a moment it seemed as if he was on the verge of punching Len, when a sharp knock on the door fortunately halted proceedings.

  ‘Come in,’ Posie shouted, expecting Babe to make herself useful for once. But she was wrong. It was Dolly, big-eyed and looking like some kind of exotic bird. She was clutching a blue letter and a telegram in her tiny hand. Posie smiled a vexed greeting.

  ‘Postman!’ Dolly trilled cheerfully, coming into the now very overcrowded office. Everyone stared at her.

  ‘These letters were downstairs, on the mat. I thought I should bring them up.’

  ‘Bad time, is it?’ She passed the letters to Posie and lit up a cigarette. ‘You seem very busy in here. Lovely office, by the way.’

  Posie started to rip open the telegram, but she was conscious of Rufus, who had now moved from his place propping up the desk and had sidled around to Dolly’s side. He moved as if he was in a dream or under a spell, and he took the battered cigarette case unconsciously from Dolly’s hands, much to her surprise. He held it to his lips, all the while looking at Dolly as if in shock.

  ‘Dash it all, I had one of these once,’ he whispered. ‘Almost the very same thing in fact. I wore it in my breast pocket at the battle of Ypres and do you know what? The ruddy thing saved me! It stopped a bullet going right through my heart. Took the full force. I always said it was my lucky charm after that.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ whispered back Dolly, as if in a trance.

  ‘I lost it my first week back in London.’ He laughed sadly. ‘Had it stolen from me when I was half-cut one night, over at the Dog and Duck in Holborn. My luck’s never been the same since.’