Murder a la Mode Read online

  She was thankful for Helen and Teresa. Poor Helen. A fine brain, a good writer, but no fashion flair at all. Of course, it wasn’t often that fashion sense and executive ability were fused in one person, as they were in Margery French. Margery was not a fool, and, without being conceited, she acknowledged this fact to herself. The question that bothered her now was the choice of her successor. Margery was shrewd and clear-minded, and she knew that she must soon retire. Who would take her place—Teresa or Helen? On the face of it, Teresa would never make an editor. She was inefficient, tactless, irresponsible, and rather lazy—and yet she had what Style needed—fashion sense—the one quality without which the magazine would die. Helen was the obvious choice, and Margery knew that the Board of Directors favoured her, and yet…Helen would not have known, instinctively, that hats were important this season. She would probably have gone all out for the jagged hem line, which was certainly showy and amusing, but which Teresa had quickly dismissed as a mere gimmick, good for a mention and one photograph but no more. Then there was another thing. Margery knew that Helen was devoted to the magazine, and would work cheerfully and loyally under Teresa’s editorship; but she also knew that Teresa had made it plain that she would not stay on if Helen were appointed. No, it must be Teresa, with all her faults. Margery closed her eyes and relaxed, as the doctor had told her. It was then that she became aware of the insistent tapping of a typewriter somewhere close at hand.

  In an instant, she was awake. That couldn’t be Miss Field—her office was too far away. It was coming from next door. Olwen’s office. Irritated, Margery got up from the couch, put on her hat, and went out into the passage. Yes, without a doubt. There was a light under Olwen’s door. Margery opened it and went in.

  Olwen Piper, the features editor of Style, presented a bizarre sight. Dressed in an unbecomingly bright orange evening dress, she was sitting at her typewriter with large horn-rimmed spectacles on her nose and her rather ugly face bent earnestly over her work. Her stockinged feet were placed solidly and inelegantly on the floor, beside a pair of kicked-off brocade shoes and a carelessly discarded white mohair stole. She did not even hear the door opening, and when Margery said, “Olwen!” sharply, she looked up dazedly, as if coming out of a dream.

  “Olwen.” Margery’s black hat quivered. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”

  Olwen was confused. “I’m sorry, Miss French. I didn’t mean…”

  “Some of us have to be here for the Collections issue,” said Margery, “but surely you’re not so overworked that you have to come to the office after midnight in those extraordinary clothes?”

  Olwen flushed. “No…no, of course not. It’s just that…well…I’ve just come from the first night of Lucifer…the new play at the Court, you know…”

  “I know.” Margery was brusque.

  “It was so exciting…” Olwen took off her glasses. Without them, she was slightly short-sighted, which gave her an attractive air of vagueness. She forgot her embarrassment, and glowed with enthusiasm. “It’s a great moment in the English theatre, Miss French. A real breakthrough which ought to start a whole new movement. The most important thing in two decades. I just had to come in and write it all down while it was in my head.”

  “You don’t imagine you’re going to get it into the March issue, do you?”

  “Oh, no.” Olwen was quite undaunted. “But I was going to ask you for more space in April. I want Michael to go down there and photograph John Hartley in the second act in that marvellous make-up, and I want to face it with…”

  “The April issue is already planned.”

  “But, Miss French, I saw Hartley afterwards, and he’s promised to do us a piece on the play from his standpoint as an anti-Brechtian actor. You know he’s always refused to comment on his own work before. The dailies have offered him thousands and—”

  “That’s very good work, Olwen. Congratulations.” Margery forced her voice to sound warm and friendly. “I’m sure we’ll be able to find room for it in April. But I do think you should go home, dear. You’ll exhaust yourself.”

  “Oh, no. I love working.”

  Margery French looked at the young, serious face, the hopelessly dowdy dress—now defiled by an inkstain—and the rather square feet liberated from their fashionable shoes. In a painful moment of truth, she recognized her twenty-two-year-old self, just down from Cambridge with a first-class degree, and passionately involved in the eternal realities of art. On the far wall, her own reflection in the mirror mocked her, mercilessly. Blue-rinsed, chic, corseted, wearing a hat in the office.

  “Fashion is an art, too,” she said, aloud.

  Olwen looked surprised. “Of course it is, Miss French,” she said politely.

  Margery did not trust herself to smile. “Goodnight, dear,” she said. She went quickly down the corridor towards her own office.

  Half past one. The tension had ebbed out of the atmosphere, leaving only exhaustion. Slowly, acrimoniously, the final layouts had been approved, and the photostat machine shrouded decently for what remained of the night. Donald MacKay mopped his brow and put on his jacket. Patrick Walsh took a well-earned swig of Irish whisky from the flask which he always kept, discreetly, in the bottom drawer of his desk, and whistled tunelessly to himself. He had had a splendid evening, full of the great, bombastic, good-tempered fights in which he reveled: what was more, he had won most of them.

  Teresa Manners powdered her exquisite nose in the rest room. Michael Healy combed his lank fair hair and noted with regret that the carnation in his buttonhole was drooping. Margery French adjusted her black straw hat and asked Rachel Field to telephone for a taxi. Then, with a slight feeling of guilt, she went into Helen’s office.

  Helen was sitting at her typewriter. Her desk was invisible under a disorderly pile of papers and layouts. Her dark hair was untidy and her sharp, rather long nose glistened almost as brightly as the rhinestones in her spectacle frames.

  “I really don’t like leaving you all alone, Helen dear,” said Margery. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to stay and help you?”

  “I’m perfectly all right, thank you, Margery,” said Helen, in the crisp voice which her secretaries knew and feared. “Once you’ve all gone, I can get down to some work in peace.”

  Margery accepted this for what it was—not rudeness, but a simple statement of fact. “Very well,” she said, “but I insist that you take tomorrow off.”

  “I can’t possibly,” said Helen. “The early form for April closes tomorrow.”

  “We can manage without you.”

  “I’d rather be here. I’ll just go home and take a bath and breakfast, and come back.”

  “Well…see how you feel in the morning.”

  “Thank you, Margery. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight. Helen.”

  With a certain reluctance, Margery went back to her own office. Helen ran a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter, and wrote: “The Beggar’s Opera has come to town. Ragged Robin is running the hedgerows of Paris in the most sophisticated tatters since…” She frowned, turned the paper up, and started again. “Paris says…rags and tatters for spring. Gamines and guttersnipes swagger jauntily through the Collections in a riot of gaudy colour…”

  It was at that moment that Godfrey Goring arrived.

  Godfrey Goring, the managing director and chief shareholder of Style Publications Ltd., was a shrewd, affable man in his early fifties. Grey-haired and distinguished, he looked exactly what he was—a businessman, pure and simple. He had bought himself a controlling interest in Style some years before, when the magazine had been in rough financial water, and it was common knowledge that he had sunk a considerable amount of his own money in the venture of pulling Style out of the doldrums and setting it firmly on its feet. The fact that Goring had been successful was chiefly due to the fact that he did not hamper his staff in any way. He knew that fashion was big business, and he prided himself on engaging the greatest experts in that ephe
meral art, and leaving them to get on with it. He tolerated their tantrums and temperaments, and allowed their zaniest ideas free rein. Their success or failure he gauged, very simply, by the amount of advertising revenue which flowed into the company from high-class manufacturers—the kind whose garments sell at upwards of twenty guineas. Privately, Godfrey always thought of clothes as garments, but he would not have dreamed of using the word in front of Patrick or Teresa; just as he would not have confided to them that Style’s celebrated standard of good taste was to him not so much a sacred trust as a moneymaking proposition. Only if revenue appeared to be falling off in one direction or another did he presume, in the discreetest possible way, to make a suggestion to his editorial staff.

  Fortunately, it was very seldom necessary. There was an ever-increasing public interest in good taste and gracious living; the commodities which Goring had to sell. Nevertheless, without his gentle but firm guidance, the magazine might well have slipped back into the unhealthy economic state in which he had found it. Of all his subordinates, only Margery French was fully aware of these realities. She was, as Goring frequently remarked, one of Style’s greatest assets. Her fashion sense was sound and true, and yet at the same time he had not hesitated to leave administrative and financial affairs in her hands when he had gone to America, just a year ago, to study transatlantic methods of printing and presentation. Godfrey Goring had a great respect and affection for Margery.

  He also appreciated the unrewarded devotion to duty that inspired the Style staff to these late-night working sessions, and this evening he felt a generous urge to recompense them. He had just concluded a most successful business dinner at The Orangery with Horace Barry, the resourceful owner of Barrimodes Ltd., to whom he had succeeded in selling a number of four-colour pages of advertising in forthcoming issues. Over coffee, they had been joined by Nicholas Knight, the brilliant young dress designer (reputed a likely candidate for promotion to the Big Ten), whose salon, workrooms, and private apartment were above The Orangery, in the house which faced Style’s offices.

  At half past one, the restaurant showed signs of closing, and Godfrey suggested that the other two should go back with him to his house in Brompton Square for a nightcap. It was when he was already on the rain-drenched pavement that he noticed the lights still burning in the Style building. Then the front door opened, and Donald MacKay came out, turning up the collar of his raincoat with a shiver.

  Goring recognized him at once, and went over. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Very well, sir. We’ve just finished—all except for Miss Pankhurst, of course. It went very smoothly, considering,” he added, not quite truthfully.

  “Ah, good, good. Well, goodnight, MacKay.”

  Donald hurried off, and Godfrey went back to his car. It was then that he conceived the typically unconventional and warmhearted gesture of inviting those of the staff who were still there to join his party. The big glass entrance doors had slammed firmly behind Donald, but Goring had his own key. He let himself in and took the lift to the fourth floor.

  His entrance could not have been better timed. Margery, Teresa, Michael, and Patrick were all in Margery’s office, and Miss Field had just reported no success with the fifth taxi rank. They were talking about getting a hire-car and sharing it. Godfrey descended on them like a deus ex machina.

  “My dear, hard-working people,” he said, “you shall all come with me in my car to Brompton Square. We will drink champagne, and then Barker shall drive each and every one of you home. No argument.”

  His eye swept quickly round the room, calculating. Barry and Knight had gone ahead in Knight’s car. That meant, besides himself, one, two, three, four, five people…five…? He counted heads again, and realized with mortification that he had, as usual, overlooked Miss Field.

  “And Miss Field, of course. You will come, won’t you, Miss Field? I know how much work Collections means for you. Our unsung heroine.”

  “I don’t think I should, Mr. Goring, thank you very much. I ought to be getting home. And in any case, I came straight here from the Paris plane. I’ve still got my suitcase, and that makes it…”

  “Crikey,” said Teresa, inelegantly. “So have Michael and I. I’d forgotten all about them. They’re in the darkroom, aren’t they, darling?”

  Godfrey Goring frowned. “I don’t think we have room for luggage as well as people,” he said. “The boot of the car is full of dog baskets, of all things, that my wife made me buy. Why don’t you leave your cases here and pick them up tomorrow? Yes, that’s the best thing. Come along now, everybody…you, too, Miss Field. I insist. I positively insist,”

  A couple of minutes later, all six of them were packed, not uncomfortably, into the dark grey Bentley which stood purring outside the front door. Godfrey slipped her into gear and moved smoothly off down the wet, shiny street—but not before he had earned the undying gratitude of the flower-seller by buying the last three bunches of red roses at an inflated price, and presenting them to Margery, Teresa, and Rachel.

  In The Orangery, tired waiters put up the shutters and counted their tips. In her office, Olwen Piper glanced at her watch and found it hard to believe that it was ten minutes past two. She got out her big dictionary and checked on the exact meanings of “neoterism” and “profulgent,” and was gratified to find that she had used them both correctly. It was a hard struggle for a dramatic critic to dig up words which had not been used too often by other people.

  At the other end of the corridor, Helen Pankhurst finished her lead-in blurb to the Collections feature. She had heard Godfrey Goring’s voice, and was profoundly thankful that he and the others had departed, leaving her in peace. She started on a caption.

  “Roger Leblanc, at Monnier, takes a swathe of aubergine silk (by Garigue), adds the sparkle of tiny diamonds (by Cartier), whips them into a featherweight meringue of a hat…” She sniffed, blew her nose again, and was suddenly aware that she was very cold indeed, in spite of the central heating. There was an electric fire beside her desk, and she got up and switched it on. In doing so, she stumbled on something, and saw to her annoyance that it was a suitcase—shabby but of good leather—with R.F. in faded gold embossed on the lid. One of the catches had sprung open, and a piece of tissue paper slipped from the overstuffed interior. Dutifully, Helen tried to refasten the lock but only succeeded in opening the other one as well. The lid sprang up, and several things fell out of the case onto the floor. The fact of the matter was that it was much too full, and Helen had neither the time nor the energy to waste on closing it. She left it as it was and went back to the featherweight meringue of a hat.

  Some time later, pausing in the middle of a caption to think up yet another synonym for “white,” Helen remembered that Ernie had never brought back her recharged Thermos, and went down the corridor to the darkroom to collect it. On entering the small storeroom, however, her attention was immediately caught by two suitcases which stood incongruously under the sink. One of them was of fine pigskin, and bore the initials M.H. The other was of white leather, with a large pink label on which was scrawled, Teresa Manners, Crillon, Paris. Helen hesitated. She suspected that one of those suitcases contained something which she was particularly anxious to lay hands on. Quickly, she tried the catch of the case in question. It was not locked. She opened it, found what she wanted, and closed it again. Then, the Thermos forgotten, she went back to her office.

  It was shortly after this that she heard footsteps in the corridor, and was only mildly surprised to see, through her open office door, that Olwen Piper was making her way towards the lift.

  Olwen called, “Goodnight, Helen. See you in the morning.” Helen did not answer. She was by now immersed in Monnier’s deceptively simple little black dress in silk and mohair mixture (by Ascher), available at Marshall & Snelgrove in late March. A little later, she was vaguely aware of the sound of the lift, and registered mentally that Olwen must have finally gone home.

  It was some hours later, wit
h many captions still to write, that Helen found herself yearning for a cup of tea, and went once again in search of her Thermos. Stiffly, still reading the sheaf of notes in her hand, she walked down the passage to the darkroom, where the Thermos stood, reassuringly, beside the electric kettle. She picked it up and, absorbed in her notes once more, carried it back to her office and put it on the desk. She poured out a mugful of tea.

  Thoughtfully, Helen ran a piece of paper into the machine, and started typing a caption. She paused for a second to consider a word, and, without taking her eyes off her work, reached out her right hand and picked up the mug. She drank, avidly. It was half past four.

  The young despatch rider from Pictorial Printers Ltd. was growing impatient. It was a miserable, dark, drizzly morning, and he had been outside the offices of Style since seven o’clock, as ordered. It was now nearly a quarter past seven, and the glass entrance doors remained firmly locked, the vestibule dark and unrevealing. He rang the night bell again. It wasn’t as if there was nobody there. He could see a light burning in one of the fourth floor windows. He was not only cross, but puzzled, for he had been doing the Style run for a couple of years, and it was one job that always went like clockwork. Had to, what’s more. The compositors were waiting, down at Sydenham, and there wouldn’t half be a dust-up if the stuff was late. Eight o’clock deadline, the foreman compositor had said. He didn’t see how he’d make it now, not with the morning rush-hour traffic.

  “Bloody woman’s probably fallen asleep,” he muttered to himself. He tried to decide what to do for the best. He knew that Alf, the doorman, did not arrive until a few minutes before eight, in time to let in the battalion of cheerful charladies who cleaned and swept the offices before the staff arrived at nine thirty.

  The despatch rider left his motor bike by the pavement, stepped back into the road, and let out a piercing whistle. The only effect of this was to attract the attention of a bored, cold policeman, who came up amiably and said, “What’s up, then, mate?”