anyone else to be let in through either entrance. Make that clear to the fellow at stage door until our lot get here. We’ll need Aubrey’s home address and a next of kin – can you sort that out?’
‘Of course, Sir. Was he married, do you know?’
‘Yes, I believe he was, but I remember Josephine saying something once about it not being a particularly happy marriage. We’ll go and see his wife as soon as we’ve finished here. Did you see Miss Beaumont on your way up? She found his body.’
‘Yes, Sir, she’s still down there with Miss Tey and another lady –
and your cousins, of course. They’re looking after her, but she’s in a terrible state. I can’t say I’m surprised,’ he said, looking down at the body. ‘I gather they were friends.’
‘Yes, they were. Will you take them somewhere more comfortable and get them a drink? I’ll be down to see them as soon as I can. If they’d rather go across the road to Number 66, that’s fine, but I don’t want them to be left alone.’
‘I’ll tell them, Sir. Just one thing before I go, though – we found that couple outside, and it was definitely White they got the tickets off. Fits the description to a tee.’
‘Then keep that idiot Bravo out of my sight for his own sake, and have a car go over the area. White might still be nearby if he’s had anything to do with this.’
‘Right, Sir, and don’t worry about Miss Tey and her friends – I’ll see they’re all right.’
‘Thanks, Bill, I appreciate it, but come back up here as quickly as you can.’
Fallowfield went downstairs with his usual calm efficiency and 139
Penrose was left alone. The building was extraordinarily quiet and he took advantage of the silence to absorb every detail of the scene. As soon as Scotland Yard arrived
but what he could best describe as the personality of the crime.
This was the closest he would get to the act which he was trying to unravel, and these minutes alone with the victim were rare and precious. It was vital to make the most of them.
He had expected Aubrey’s office to have something of the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club about it, but he was wrong. The remnant of many a savoured cigarette hung in the air and the furniture – an assortment of mahogany, oak and leather – could easily have been transported to White’s or Boodle’s, but that was where the similarity ended. In fact, there were a number of unexpectedly feminine touches to the room: vases of flowers – irises, he noted with interest – were dotted around the shelves and on the mantelpiece, and soft, pale colours had been chosen for the walls and cushions. Clearly, Aubrey had spent a good deal of time here: even without the disarray caused by his death, the room was untidy and littered with books – unpretentious editions of plays and novels, most of which looked well-read – and photograph albums containing informal pictures of actors and actresses next to their professional stage portraits. Two large windows – their curtains still tied back – stretched down to the floor, suggesting that, in the daytime, this was a light and airy space.
Penrose walked over to the huge oak desk which dominated the side of the room nearest the windows, and knew as surely as if her blood were still on it that he was looking at the weapon which had killed Elspeth Simmons. Just to the right of a leather blotter, which took up most of the desk’s surface, lay a bayonet of simple design, its polished blade contrasting starkly with the dark wood of the furniture. Although shockingly out of context here, the weapon was a familiar sight to him: knife bayonets like this had been common issue in the war as an infantryman’s most impor-140
tant close combat weapon. They were a crucial part of life in the trenches – just as crucial, in fact, as the rectangular brass tin that had been placed next to the knife, something less deadly, perhaps, but no less evocative to anyone who had lived through those times. It was a tobacco tin, a Christmas present sent out to the troops each year of the war to boost their morale. He remembered his own, received during the Christmas of 1915; he still had it –
everyone did, if they had returned safely, because there was something inexplicably precious about a small piece of English metal that had not been fashioned to kill. An identical tin was the only thing of Jack’s that he had been able to give to Josephine after her lover’s death. The tin in front of him now was particularly battered and worn. Its hinged lid was open and he could see a cream card with a red crest at the bottom – good wishes for a victorious new year from the Princess Mary and friends at home – but what interested him more was not standard issue. On top of the card lay a flower head, an iris, which had evidently been preserved for some time. It was fragile and drained of all its colour, but unmistakably the same variety that had been found with Elspeth’s body.
The shape of the leaves, closed tightly around the flower, mirrored almost precisely the form of the bayonet. They lay parallel, and the direction of the twin blades led his eyes beyond the desk towards a single photograph, not in an album like the others but placed alone on a bookshelf. The woman framed in silver had a pleasant face, but she lacked the glamour and self-consciousness that united the actresses pictured elsewhere in the room; it was certainly no one he recognised. Was she Aubrey’s wife, or someone else who had been important in his life? And was he reading too much into the flower and knife by imagining that they pointed towards her? They might easily have been casually placed, but somehow he doubted it.
The other items on and around the desk were less incongruous.
A crystal tumbler containing half an inch or so of whisky stood at one corner, the corresponding bottle having been consigned –
empty – to a nearby waste paper basket, where it nestled amongst some torn-up envelopes. Next to a well- used ashtray, the tele-141
phone receiver dangled uselessly off its hook, but it had obviously been put to good service recently because the blotting paper was covered in half a dozen numbers and initials. Penrose copied them down, then put on his gloves and gently opened the top middle drawer of the desk. It was full of headed note paper, and the drawers to left and right contained a similar assortment of stationery, but the lower levels seemed more revealing. The first one he came to was full of bills and accounts, the second of contracts for those employed in Aubrey’s two theatres; they would have to be gone through in detail, but it was personal documents that he hoped to find now, anything that might give more substance to an idea forming in his head as to the link between Elspeth Simmons and Bernard Aubrey. Is that what Aubrey wanted to talk to him about?
He began to give up hope as he turned up pile upon pile of business correspondence, then, in the very last drawer, he unearthed something more promising – a collection of letters, all addressed to Aubrey in the same distinctive hand and, judging by the lack of any postmark, all privately delivered. Starting at the top of the heap, he worked his way through them with increasing astonishment: the letters were not what he was looking for, but they certainly offered another line of enquiry. So absorbed was he that Fallowfield had been standing quietly at his side for a couple of minutes, looking at the weapon and the flower, before Penrose even noticed he was there.
