‘I didn’t realise she was dead at first, you see,’ Hilda explained. ‘She had her back to me, and when I saw her I thought that something had gone on between her and her father. If I’m honest, I thought she’d hurt him—then I realised it was the other way round.’
‘Why did you think that Marjorie had hurt her father?’ Penrose asked.
‘Because he was hanging around here at lunchtime yesterday, asking to see her. She went over the road to meet him, and when she came back she seemed upset—angry, really. I think she was ashamed of him—she never talked about her home life. She kept apologising in case he’d been any bother to me.’
‘It’s us that should be sorry,’ Lettice said. ‘All the time it was going on, we were just across the road at the theatre. My God,’ she added, remembering, ‘we even saw the lights go out. We could have helped her.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Just after the play finished, so around ten-fifteen, I suppose. We should have gone up to see her, like we said we would. We should never have let this happen.’
‘Damn right we shouldn’t.’ Ronnie lit a cigarette and looked provocatively at Archie, daring him to forbid her to smoke at a crime scene. ‘Why didn’t we know that Marjorie was in trouble? Because we never have time to talk to those girls about anything except work, that’s why. We’re so busy with our plays and our reviews and our fucking charity galas that we can’t see what’s going on under our roof. I swear to God, if that bastard hadn’t cracked his own skull open, I’d be more than happy to do it for him.’
Fallowfield reappeared in the yard and nodded discreetly to Penrose. ‘The rest of the building’s clear, Sir,’ he said. ‘Nothing looks out of place except in the workroom.’
‘Fine. Well, if everyone could go up to the flat now, I’ll be with you as soon as I can. And Mr Gaunt—you must be very late for work, so we won’t keep you any longer at the moment. We’ll need a formal statement from you in due course, and there may be some further questions—let Detective Sergeant Fallowfield know how we can get hold of you, and you’re free to go. Can we give you a lift anywhere?’
‘No thank you, Sir—I’m only a couple of minutes away. I work at the Coliseum.’
‘Stage crew?’ Penrose asked, and Gaunt nodded. They watched as Lettice and Ronnie led Hilda Reader round to the front of the building. ‘Thank you for what you’ve done this morning,’ Penrose added. ‘It can’t have been easy for you. I’d appreciate it if you could keep the details to yourself at the moment. Miss Baker’s remaining family will have to be told and I need to establish exactly what happened here—and all that will be much less painful without the help of the evening papers. Can I rely on you not to mention names to anyone?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Gaunt said.
For once, Penrose actually believed the answer he was given. ‘Is the team on its way?’ he asked Fallowfield. ‘This snow’s not much at the moment, but it’s going to get worse.’
‘Should be here any minute, Sir. I caught Spilsbury on his way out—said he’d come right over.’
‘Excellent.’ Penrose left Fallowfield to take down Gaunt’s details, and walked over to the foot of the staircase. Standing at a distance, so as not to disturb the area immediately around the body, he looked down at the dead man. He lay with his head towards the stairs and parallel with the building, one hand close to his face, the other flung out behind him, just touching the step, as though he had still been trying to save himself when he hit the ground. In his sixties, Penrose guessed, and, from what he could see where the snow had not settled, shabbily dressed. Crouching down, he noticed the raw, red discolouration on the man’s knuckles where his skin had been exposed to the cold; the snow had done its quiet work, drifting, enfolding, obliterating; imperceptibly draining his life if the fall had not killed him, and creating more difficulties for those investigating his death.
Penrose turned his back on Baker and headed upstairs through the front entrance to try to piece together the last moments of his daughter’s life, stopping on the way to fetch his bag from the car. He stood just inside the door to the workroom, taking advantage of the stillness before forensics arrived to absorb the scene as a whole. Once the detailed analysis of individual pieces of evidence began, the chance to do this was lost, so he was always relieved to be the first professional to arrive at the scene of a crime; photographs were invaluable, and many a cruel murder had been solved in the photographic department high above the Thames, but, for Penrose, there was no substitute for his own first impressions. Carefully, he put his bag down on the table nearest the door and took out some gloves, then walked slowly into the room. It was a scene of nauseating horror. Marjorie was slumped on an upright wooden chair and, although he could see the extent of her injuries in the mirror, nothing could have prepared him for the trauma of looking directly into her face. It was impossible to imagine what she might have been like in life, so distorted and mutilated were her features. Blood and vomit had trickled down her nose and out through the stitches in her lips. It ran in narrow lines down her face and onto the front of her sewing smock, defacing the Motley monogram. Penrose noticed the small pieces of black glass which mingled with it and realised that Marjorie’s suffering must have begun long before the needle touched her skin. As he looked closer, he could see tiny cuts and grazes all around her nose and on her cheeks, presumably from glass which had missed her mouth in the violence of the attack; some of the beads were still on the table next to the body, and he saw that they had been roughly crushed to make their edges even sharper and more deadly. Her swollen lips were bruised and discoloured, and the needle—about four inches long and angled at the tip—hung down from her mouth on a length of thick, black thread. The stitching was crudely done, and Penrose could not even begin to imagine the pain; in truth, though, he didn’t have to—the evidence of that was all too obvious in her eyes. Glazed and passive in death, and fixed on their merciless reflection, they nevertheless seemed to plead with him to call a halt to the torment; as he crouched down beside her, obscuring the line of vision between the body and its grotesque mirror image, he could almost believe that she was grateful.
Marjorie’s hands were clasped together in her lap, but the red marks around her wrists suggested that they had, at some point, been tied together. There was a similar chafing to her neck, and the width of the mark seemed to match the tape measure which hung over the back of the chair. Penrose had tried to prevent his mind from focusing on the stench of the body, but it was unavoidable; he would not know until the post mortem whether the incontinence was a result of some sort of toxic substance or purely of fear, but he would be surprised to find that Marjorie had not been incapacitated in some way. She was young and looked reasonably strong, but there was no sign of a struggle in the room: the work tables still stood in neat rows and the chairs and tailor’s dummies remained upright and undamaged. The killer would have had ample time to tidy up, of course, but somehow Penrose did not think that was what had happened. No, he sensed something much more controlled and methodical in this determined violation of a young girl’s body. He stood and looked around him at the fabrics and drawings, at the contrasts of colour and texture that filled the room. Death was always ugly, whether it came from a merciful bullet to the head or the sort of prolonged torture he saw here, but more often than not it confined itself to poorer districts and normal, even squalid, domesticity; the fact that it had been allowed to taint a place of beauty, that Marjorie had been disfigured in the most repellent way amid the trappings of class and fashion, seemed to him significant.
It occurred to Penrose that this was the first time he had attended a murder scene in a room he knew well, and he was struck by the way in which violence affected the atmosphere; it went far beyond the power of any physical damage, and he wondered how Lettice and Ronnie would cope with what had taken place here, or if Hilda Reader would ever feel capable of working in this studio again. He remembered what he and Josephine had discussed the other night: the story wasn’t the crime or the investigation—the stages which concerned him; it was how people picked up from there and carried on with their lives. If the obvious explanation here turned out to be the truth, and Marjorie’s father had fallen to his death after killing her, then Penrose’s involvement in their narrative was over before it really started; for everyone else—Marjorie’s family and workmates, others who would be destroyed by the shame of what her father had done—it was just the beginning, and he suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow for the unrecognised victims of murder, the thousands of people for whom justice was not the same as solace, and who were left to cope while professionals like him washed their hands of one set of lives and moved on to the next.
Somehow, though, he didn’t think his business with the Bakers was finished yet: the obvious scenario might be logical, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. He glanced across the table next to the body, taking in the cotton reels and squares of material, the boxes of pins and needles—all the clutter which would make the necessary analysis of the scene so difficult—and stopped when he noticed an empty vodka bottle and two glasses. That might easily explain how Marjorie had been drugged, but, after what Hilda Reader had said, would the girl really have settled down for a cosy drink with her father on work premises? He doubted it. There was something else, too: on the floor by the mirror lay another sewing smock, exactly like the one which Marjorie wore. When he bent down to examine it, he could smell the faintest trace of vomit and see that it was covered in tiny flecks of
