lad,’ Fallowfield said, and his tone was not unkind. ‘We’ll be with you in a minute.’
As Bartlett took White down to the car, Penrose and Fallowfield searched the rest of the room quickly and efficiently, but found nothing of interest. ‘I think a quick look round next door, Sergeant, don’t you?’ Penrose suggested with a wry smile, but the result was the same there. ‘You know, Bill, we’ve got the so-called prime suspect in custody and we’re no further forward now than we were an hour ago,’ he said, unable to hide his disappointment.
‘When are we going to get some help?’
The answer came sooner than he expected. ‘Sir,’ Bartlett said as Penrose shut the car door, ‘there’s an Alice Simmons at the station and she wants to talk to you urgently.’
There were two messages waiting for Penrose when he got back to the Yard. One was from Josephine, who had remembered where she read about the iris, but said it would wait until she saw him later; the other was from Maybrick at the theatre, reporting that Terry had tried to get into the building during the morning and had demanded to know what was going on.
‘Could be a bluff, Sir,’ Fallowfield suggested. ‘After all, he had a lot to gain from Aubrey’s death. He could be making a public display of ignorance to fool us.’
Penrose was doubtful but not in the mood to rule anything out.
‘We’ll have to see him later today, but I’m hoping Alice Simmons will point us in the right direction. In the meantime, perhaps you’d be kind enough to telephone Mr Terry and tell him that his first task as boss of two theatres is to cancel all productions until further notice. That won’t go down well, I’m sure, but it will keep him busy for a few hours until we can get to speak to him. Then come back here. I want you to see Alice Simmons with me.’
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While he was waiting for Fallowfield, Penrose tried to telephone Josephine, but was told her line was engaged. He doubted he’d have time to see her today: there was a lot to do and he wanted to get through as much as possible before he had to report to his super in the morning. And he desperately needed a few hours’
sleep. The only time he remembered being this tired was when his regiment had been on the move and he hadn’t fully recovered from an injury; they’d had to march for hours at a time and he remembered falling over in the road while others staggered round him, too exhausted to lift their feet high enough to step over him. It wasn’t long after Jack’s death, and his nights had been sleepless with sadness and worry about Josephine – it was that more than the physical exhaustion which had really affected him. Nothing, it seemed, made him quite as weary as worrying about Josephine, though she wouldn’t thank him for it.
A mug of strong, black coffee appeared on the desk in front of him and he smiled gratefully at his sergeant. ‘Where do you get your energy from, Bill? Is it all that good Suffolk air you grew up with?’
‘I think it’s more straightforward than that, Sir. You sent me home for a couple of hours, remember? And as predicted, John Terry has gone up in the air and not come down. I didn’t know actors had such a vocabulary, but I’ve learnt a few words that aren’t in any script I know of.’
As they made their way downstairs, Penrose confided his fears to Fallowfield. ‘If Alice Simmons can’t tell us much about Elspeth’s background, we’re in an impossible position,’ he said. ‘We’re relying on there being a link between her and Aubrey but it would take an age to trace it by official records, and this killer’s going at the rate of one a day. There won’t be any room in the mortuary if we don’t soon find a shortcut between the past and the present.’
‘It’s a good sign that she wanted to see you right away, though,’
said Fallowfield, as optimistic as ever. ‘She must have something to say.’
‘She probably wants to know why I haven’t found her daughter’s killer yet,’ Penrose muttered as he opened the door of the interview room. ‘I would in her position.’
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But the woman seated at the small table in the middle of the room did not look as though she had come to complain to anybody; in fact, she looked like someone with no fight left in her at all. There was no blood relationship between Alice and Betty Simmons so it was silly of Penrose to have assumed a resemblance, but he realised now that he had imagined Elspeth’s mother as another version of her aunt. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. In her bearing, at least, she had none of the restraint that had been evident in her sister-in-law’s every move; in fact, even in the formal surroundings of a police interview room, she looked more relaxed than Betty had been in her own home.
She was tall, with attractive silver blonde hair which refused to be contained in its entirety by a plait, and she wore a suit which was sober only in its colouring; no part of the outfit had escaped a few little finishing-off touches and Penrose, who had never realised that black could be so expressive, searched in vain for a square inch of plain material; even the gloves on the table were attached to velvet flowers, while the hat, which was too big to go anywhere else but on the floor beside its keeper, was the most creative item of mourning attire that he had ever seen. What was most remarkable, though, was that Alice Simmons carried it all off with a dignity and composure which few people achieved with straight lines and understated simplicity.
‘Thank you for coming here so quickly, Mrs Simmons,’ Penrose said, ‘but I’m truly sorry for the circumstances that have brought you.’
‘Everybody’s been very kind,’ she said, so quietly that Penrose could barely hear her. ‘At the . . . the people who are looking after Elspeth couldn’t have been more thoughtful, and Betty said you were all working so hard to find out what happened. I am grateful, you know. Really I am.’
She looked at Penrose for the first time, and it seemed to him that fate had played a cruel trick in deciding that Alice Simmons would share no characteristic, no matter how small, with the daughter she so dearly loved. Her colouring, build and general demeanour were all distinctly at odds with the Elspeth he had seen 219
in Hedley’s photograph, and he wondered if the physical disparity had been a painful reminder to both mother and daughter that their relationship was built on a fragile practical arrangement rather than an unassailable natural bond. ‘We’re doing our best, Mrs Simmons,’ he said, and introduced Fallowfield, who took the empty cup from the table and sent the constable at the door off for a refill. ‘But I have to admit, we could do with a little help and we’re hoping you’ll be able to supply it.’
‘Of course you need help. How can you be expected to get anywhere when you only know half the story?’ She took a handkerchief from her bag, a safeguard against what was to come. ‘They let me sit with Elspeth for a bit, just the two of us,’ she continued.
‘I had to tell her I was sorry. She grew up surrounded by so much misery and the only consolation was that she never knew about it
