Nestling under a sheaf of minor memoranda was a slim manila folder marked ‘Top secret. For your eyes only’, with the familiar markings of MI5. Pinned to the cover was a small handwritten note from Sir Hugh that read, ‘Your Majesty, I believe this is the file you requested. I strongly advise you not to read it. I would be more than happy to apprise you of its contents.’
She looked up with a smile. One of her ladies-in-waiting had gone to a convent boarding school where, she said, there was a leatherbound volume in the library in which the nuns had made a note on the title page, forbidding girls to read ‘pages 63, 72 and 147’. Needless to say, these pages were heavily thumbed, and the rest of the book was pristine. Catholic schoolgirls were no fools.
Poor Sir Hugh. He was honour-bound as her private secretary to provide the file that she had asked for, and equally desperate for her not to see it. She unpinned his note and saw that the file was precisely what she had hoped: the record of a stakeout in Cresswell Place covering the night of 31 March. She read through the opening pages with a churning mixture of relief and high anxiety.
The same morning, an envelope addressed to ‘The Man In Charge Of The Chelsea Murders’ arrived at the police station in Lucan Place.
Darbishire stared at the letter in front of him for the hundredth time. He picked it up, sniffed it and handed it to DS Woolgar, who was currently taking up most of the space in his office.
‘What do you think? Can you smell something on the paper? I’m sure I—’
‘L’Air du Temps, sir,’ Woolgar said happily. ‘Nina Ricci. My mother likes it, sir.’
Darbishire’s forehead crinkled. ‘Did they
‘Smells nice, sir, doesn’t it? I wish more women would think of it.’
‘When writing to a detective inspector at the CID? About a murder?’
Woolgar shrugged. ‘At least it tells us something, sir.’
‘What’s that, Sergeant? Do explain.’
Woolgar was still keen as a puppy, even after the Seymour debacle, which had kept him down for about fifteen minutes. If hard police work was required, he was less interested, but if it was just a matter of ‘the little grey cells’, he was all over it like a rash.
‘She’s a tart with good taste. And we know she’s not stupid. No fingerprints on the notepaper. And she can type.’ Woolgar nodded approvingly.
‘I give up,’ Darbishire sighed. He had been niggled by the Seymour incident because he had actually listened to his sergeant’s lurid fantasies, and now he felt a fool. ‘No, Woolgar, we don’t know she’s a tart. Your suggestion she has good taste is subjective. She might even be a “he”.’
‘Oh, no, sir,’ Woolgar said confidently. ‘Definitely a “she”. And what she says about DS Willis at the end, sir, well . . .’
His confidence was, in the inspector’s considered opinion, misplaced. For now, all they knew was that someone had written them a typed, anonymous, scented letter consisting of three short paragraphs, on the sort of cheap paper you can buy for half a shilling in Woolworths, and they’d posted it near the sorting office in Oxford Street, which means it could be any one of ten thousand people. (Darbishire gave Woolgar one thing: whoever it was wasn’t stupid.) And that person knew Gina Fonteyn.
Or Ginette Fleury, as he must now think of her. Everyone who spoke of her had been so confident that she was Italian. Darbishire served in Italy, and he recognised how different the languages were. It made him despair.
‘It may all be pie in the sky,’ he said, ‘but we can’t ignore it. I’ll contact my friend at the Sûreté, and see if they’ve got a record of Ginette and Marianne Fleury in Paris. If Marianne was captured and sent away, they should know about it. And if “Rodriguez” worked for the Gestapo, they might have a record of him.’
‘Bound to, sir.’
Darbishire tapped his pen on the letter. ‘Don’t forget, Sergeant. A critical eye.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Woolgar said, with a grin that made it clear he already believed all of it. ‘So they
He’d learned nothing. Absolutely nothing.
‘Perhaps they did.’
‘They could have been lovers, and he let her down. Or ran away, sir.’
‘She was fifteen at the time, according to this letter!’
Woolgar shrugged. ‘You never know.’
Darbishire had little girls at home and shuddered at the thought. ‘Surely if her sister was in the Resistance, it’s more likely that he betrayed them somehow? If anything, they were mortal enemies.’
Woolgar seemed pleased by this response. ‘You see? Not pie in the sky at all, sir. She killed him, and then one of his old mates came in somehow and found them there, and killed her.’
Darbishire leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘And washed her, and laid her out all neatly? Because . . . ?’
‘Because he was secretly in love with her. Which is why he’d followed them there in the first place. To save her from herself. Or because he was jealous. Maybe both.’
