what to say if she deigns to speak to them. You’ll have to nip up to the Esso garage and buy flowers and refreshments. And get this place looking decent. And hide anything unsavoury from the royal view. You might start with Mr. Bryant’s office.” Here, Land was thinking specifically of the marijuana plant Bryant kept beneath his desk ‘for his rheumatism,“ the reeking Tibetan skull on his shelf, and some of the more outre and explicit books with which he surrounded himself.
“Sir?” April raised a timid hand. “Mr. Bryant asked me to warn you about the petri dishes he keeps in his cupboard. He’s been growing some virulent bacillus cultures, some experiment he’s conducting into plague transmission in the Middle Ages. I accidentally knocked over one of them yesterday. I don’t want to worry you, but do you think it’s wise to expose the Princess to a possibly dangerous virus? Perhaps we should cancel her visit.”
“Don’t try to bamboozle me, girl,” snapped Land. “Bryant’s had those pots and dishes for donkey’s years. He made us all as sick as dogs in ‘85 after using one to serve cocktail sausages in at the Christmas party, but they’re inert now. I even saw Crippen eating from one of them. We have to do something about that cat. He smells quite indescribable when he’s wet. Bryant’s just attempting to get the visit postponed, but it won’t work.”
“There’s another problem,” April blurted. “The network cabling. The carpenters have had to tear the floorboards up, and they can’t guarantee they’ll be able to put everything back in time. Surely you don’t want the Princess falling through our floor.”
“Then I’ll put a rocket up them, you watch,” snapped Land. “They’ll finish the job by lunchtime if I threaten to withdraw their pay.” He stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
35
Janice had marked the page in Lilith’s diary with a Post-it note. Straphanging in the tube on her way through the Piccadilly line, she reread the entries, virtually the only ones Lilith had bothered to make: a series of appointments over the last three months at a Knightsbridge beauty salon, including several training sessions in deportment. The entries had immediately struck her as being incongruous. Here was a girl who had mutilated her arm to please her new boyfriend, who was taking drugs and behaving irrationally. Why would she attend the kind of expensive salon usually frequented by wealthy middle-aged women?
As she ventured in through the doors of The Temple, at least three pairs of women studied her before turning their heads and whispering to one another. Longbright realised it was because she was wearing a standard-issue black padded police jacket and what appeared to be men’s boots, the continuing inclement weather having finally forced her to abandon her usual array of exotic outfits.
As Longbright passed through, she had the all-too-familiar feeling of being looked down upon, because she was a woman in a man’s job, because she had a job at all, because she was large and unusual. It took extra effort to hold her head up and march through these pampered, supine women who were more like pets than adults.
The Temple was a hip take on the ladies’ salons of the 1950s, but now the red flock wallpaper patterns were finished in shocking retro pinks and crimsons, and for the price of a full day’s body treatment you could once have bought a car in Knightsbridge. On the salon’s faux-marbled wall was a photograph of a man in sunglasses with a bouffant hair stack, a sharkskin suit and a narrow black tie. Beneath it ran a caption:
“I would like an appointment with Monsieur Alphonse,” she told the receptionist, a lacquered raptor who had been exfoliated and plucked to a life-threatening degree. She flicked through her suede-edged address book with a crimson claw, avoiding Longbright’s gaze. “Let’s see, we could fit you in at the beginning of March. Are you here for our extreme skin-care rehabilitation program?”
“No, I’m not,” said Longbright, affronted. “I always wear a heavy foundation. I’d like to see Monsieur Alphonse right now.”
The receptionist performed a double-take that nearly dislodged her from her perch. “Monsieur Alphonse can’t possibly take short-notice appointments. I’m afraid such a request is completely out of the question.”
Longbright flicked her badge onto the counter and gave her a hard smile. “Oh, it’s not a request.”
Monsieur Alphonse was, to her surprise, not a South London wide boy with a dodgy Parisian accent, but a Chelsea footballer from the mid-nineties called Darren Spender who had stumbled upon a way of extending his brief claim to fame. According to the tabloids, running The Temple was his way of making a fortune while searching for his next ex-wife, although Longbright could tell from his patronising attitude to women that, like so many men of rudimentary maturity, he had bypassed monogamy in favour of indefinitely sustained states of sexual tension. Unlike his customers, he preferred nothing to be cut-and-dried. As a consequence, he had been photographed leaving bars with a wide variety of pneumatically enhanced exotic dancers in the back pages of
“It’s not good for business having the police come in here,” said Spender, inviting her to sit and twinkling moodily at her. “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Longbright, “at least, not since that rubbish penalty you took against Aston Villa. Know this girl?”
If Spender was surprised by Lilith’s picture, he betrayed no sign of it. “I wouldn’t have any idea,” he said. “We have a high turnover of clients, as you can imagine. I don’t deal with them all personally, you know. This is a business.”
Your name is in her diary for three of the five appointments, so I assumed you were acquainted.“
“There’s a sliding scale for my second-, third- and fourth-level assistants.”
“Her name was Lilith Starr, and I’m using the past tense because she’s dead.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” He didn’t miss a beat. “How can I help?”
“One of the things we have to do in a situation like this is establish her movements during her final days. She came to see you forty-eight hours before she died, hence my need for this visit. Lilith lived in a squat in Camden Town. What does it cost to cut someone’s hair?”
“It depends on which stylist the client books. Let me call someone.” Using an old-fashioned desk intercom, he rang his outside office. “Can you get Sonya in here?”
A tall blonde in her mid-thirties, dressed in an iridescent pink trouser suit and heels, entered and seated herself beside Spender. Longbright passed her the photograph and waited for a response.
“How much do you charge for a consultation, Mr. Spender?” asked Longbright.
“My personal rate starts at five hundred pounds an hour.”
“I remember this girl,” said Sonya, tapping the picture.
Longbright turned her attention to the Barbie woman. “How much did Lilith pay for your services?”
Sonya attempted to show that she was analysing the question, but the effect merely looked guarded and secretive. “I believe we gave her a very healthy discount rate,” she said finally.
“I don’t understand. Why would you do that? You’re a beautician, not a philanthropist.”
Sonya gave a quick, insincere smile. “She was getting a full makeover. Skin care, dietary control, hair, manicure, body-wrapping, makeup, deportment, speech therapy, one of our best tailored lifestyle packages. She wanted to shed her origins. I remember when she first came in with one of our New Talent flyers. One glance at her
