She was uncertain enough to win me time, so I hurried into the room and closed the door. Mary was standing in front of the dead fire, gripping her little handbag as though it was some vital defence. I stood and looked at her. She wasn't bad looking, I realised, in an underfed, pinched sort of fashion. Many a man would . . . I drove the thought from my mind, and told her to sit down. I took over the place by the fireplace so I could look down on her.
'So you were the assistant of Madam Boninska,' I said. 'You know the police are after you?'
She nodded.
'Don't worry; I won't tell them. Although I should say they do not have the slightest thought that you killed her. They want you as a witness, nothing more.'
'They always want more,' she said. She had a dull, flat and entirely unattractive voice, which went well with the vaguely blank look in her eyes. 'And they don't pay as well as you do.'
'How much I pay will depend on how much you tell me,' I said. 'So don't get any ideas just yet. Were you there when this woman was killed? Did you see who did it?'
'No,' she replied. 'I didn't see anything. I was out. I came back and found her, and thought, they'll blame me for this, so I ran for it.'
'Quite understandable,' I commented. 'But do you know who did it?'
She shook her head. 'She had no enemies in the world,' she said. 'She was a lovely woman.' She looked at me like a bird eyeing a worm. 'A guinea.'
I did in fact have the money in my room, but was loath to let it go to her. Then I sighed, ran quickly up the stairs then returned and counted the money out onto the table. 'Don't touch,' I said as she leaned forward. 'What was she like?'
'A cow,' she said. 'A mean, vicious cow. I hated her. I almost danced for joy when I saw her lying on the floor. She was always drunk, she smelled, and she had a way of talking to you. Made you feel like dirt. I hated her.'
'Don't you have to be charming to clients in that line of business? Fortune-telling, I mean?'
'Oh, yes. For a bit. She could crawl as well as anyone when she wanted. Until she got hold of them, then she'd drop all that. When she was squeezing money out of them, there was no more of that.'
'What do you mean?'
'She'd get people to these séances and get them to tell all their secrets, thinking they were talking to spirits. Then she'd say, you don't want your wife, or your partner, or your parents, to hear about that, do you . . . ?'
'Give me an example.'
'One woman came, she twisted her into saying she'd had a friend. You know. She was married, you see. And the mistress got this woman's jewels, her rings, all her money off her. She killed herself, eventually, because when she was bled dry the mistress wrote a dirty little letter to the husband. I had to deliver it. She showed me the notice in the paper, she pinned it on the wall, like it was some great achievement. She was proud of it.'
'And you?'
She shrugged. 'What do I care?'
'More than you admit. Never mind. I want to ask you about a man who came to see her. This man.'
I showed her the photograph of Ravenscliff.
'Yes, I remember him.' I felt a surge of excitement rush through me at the words.
'Tell me everything. The money on the table depends on it.'
'He wasn't a client,' she said after thinking about it for a while. 'Not for the table-turning and such. Normally she got all dressed up for that, put on her special clothes and started talking in this voice – trying to be mysterious and spooky. You know. This was different. They talked.'
'Do you know what about?'
'No. But she wanted money off him.'
'Did she get it?'
'Not the time I was there. He was angry about something, that I heard. "Unless you tell me there'll be nothing for you."'
'And you don't know what he meant?'
She shook her head.
Not very helpful. 'This Madame Boninska. What do you know about her?'
'Not much. I mean, she didn't exactly tell me anything, did she? She treated me like dirt. She either looked down on everyone or tried to pull them down. You should have heard the things she said about the people who came to see her. So nice and sympathetic she was to them until she'd got her claws into them. Then they learned more about her.'
'Go on.'
'Don't know really. She wasn't Russian. Not a foreigner at all. But she'd been abroad for a long time. That she told me. At the Russian Court, high places in Germany, so she said. They all loved Madame Boninska.'
'So why did she come back to England?'
'I reckon everyone else had tumbled to her and she hadn't anywhere else to go. But she reckoned she'd hit a gold mine here. She was going to make her fortune. She was going to get her due, that's what she said. Then she did, of course. Someone killed her. And if that wasn't her due, I don't know what was.'
'You have no idea . . . ?'
'I've told you – she told me nothing. I was a servant. That's all. I think I preferred the street. But I hung on just in case she was telling the truth. Just in case she was going to get hold of some money.'
'There was no money in the flat when the police found the body.'
