Olga Carter-Fox contemplated the woman she had once known as Nanny Forrester. Her first reaction was surprise at how spry her former nurse was: not yet an old woman, although she remembered her thirty years ago as a middle-aged gorgon. But the former Nanny Forrester was gone; she was now apparently to be called Glenys.
“Since we are more like friends!” said Miss Glenys Forrester with a little laugh. She poured Olga a second cup of coffee out of a bone-china coffee-pot, painted with tiny roses and forget-me-nots. A plate containing sugary biscuits matched exactly and so did the cups, with handles so spindly it was difficult to hold them.
Then Miss Forrester twinkled even more archly. “Especially as I’m going to be able to vote for Mr. Carter-Fox on Thursday. What a surprise to find I was in your constituency after all these years! At the time I just couldn’t help dropping Mr. Carter-Fox a wee note, reminding him of the connection, and a card for you. Then of course there was my problem with the Town Hall, everyone there is so dreadfully left wing. Mr. Carter-Fox did what he could, but I suppose I had hoped for some tiny personal touch from you, Olga …”
She rattled on in what was a parody of amiability, just as Olga remembered her: “Still you must have so many responsibilities. Just one little girl, Elfrida, isn’t it? I loved the photo—more like Lady Imogen, I thought, than you. The eyes, anyway. But isn’t it terrible when they lose their teeth and they will smile to the camera? I bet you and Mr. Carter-Fox had a good laugh about that photograph.”
Then Glenys Forrester returned to the subject of their new friendship. “Certainly, I don’t expect you to call me Nanny any longer. I haven’t been called Nanny since I left you. In my next post I was called Glenys. Mrs. Arkwright considered Nanny to be quite old-fashioned. And later I called the Arkwrights themselves, Jack and Josephine Arkwright, you know, the Arkwright Foundation, they do so much for charity, I was asked to call them Jack and Josephine. Wasn’t that surprising?”
Olga wanted to say, “Since those were their names, it would have been surprising if they had asked you to call them anything else.” But she bit back the childish impulse. She was here, in this horrible, stuffy, over-furnished West London flat, drinking weak milky coffee and eating sweet biscuits, only because she was desperate. Nevertheless, Olga was reminded how much she had always disliked the late Nanny Forrester, now her friend Glenys. Fortunately, it seemed the dislike had not been mutual.
“Of course Olga, you were always my little pet.” Glenys Forrester spoke in a sentimental voice which Olga also remembered from the past, in those days applied to kittens in baskets, baa-lambs with blue bows, and flower fairies. “That’s what I told the Arkwright boys, and all my other families. Olga Swain was quite the best behaved little girl I ever looked after. Not that deep down you didn’t have a temper—your little black clouds we used to call them—but your manners were a joy. Millie was quite another matter. What a little liar! As I always told your mother.
“And how is she?” Glenys Forrester hardly varied her cosy tone. “Of course I don’t believe all I read in the newspapers.” She pursed her lips. “But really, some of the things she says in public! And badgering our poor Prime Minister all the time. As if he didn’t have better things to do.”
Then a curiously avid expression crossed Glenys Forrester’s face. “So what’s he like?” she added.
Olga was startled. “H.G.? Very good manners. As you would expect.” It seemed an appropriate thing to say to a former Nanny.
“No, no, not the Prime Minister. Randall Birley. Does he come to your dinner parties? I watched Rebecca, I wouldn’t move from the set. I told my friends, now just don’t telephone me on Sunday nights …”
But Olga Carter-Fox had not dug out Nanny Forrester’s change-of-address card (hitherto purposefully ignored by her) to talk about Randall Birley. She thought it best to come right out with what she did want. “Nan—Glenys. Something extraordinary, something horrible has happened. How can I put this? I’m afraid it will be a great shock to you. It was a great shock to me. It’s to do with the old days at Hippodrome Square. It’s to do with the house itself.”
“The house—” It was Glenys Forrester’s turn to look startled. She put down the delicate coffee cup she had been endlessly sipping. Olga knew that she would be even more astonished at what was coming next—astonished, and no doubt legitimately horrified. Olga had to press on while she still had the advantage of surprise.
“Glenys, I wonder whether you would talk to someone about the old days, and how you left us so suddenly. The fact is that I have someone with me, someone outside, Jemima Shore, you know, from television, Jemima Shore Investigator.”
“Here? Television cameras here, oh Olga, what on earth, I don’t understand, an interview—” Glenys Forrester touched her hair. “I must make some more coffee.” You could almost have said she bridled. The hair style had smartened up since Olga’s childhood and there was evidence of a blue rinse.
“Not actually on television,” Olga explained patiently. “You see, Jemima Shore’s helping us, Harry and me.” Olga judged it better not to mention Millie. “This is all absolutely confidential.” And there was another thing Olga judged it better not to mention to Glenys Forrester: she was fairly sure the former Nanny would end up having to talk to the police.
But she, Olga, could fight this thing better—this thing, whatever you called it, this scandal—she could tight it better if she at least knew the facts, the ancient facts. She could hardly persuade Nanny Forrester to trim her story. That would be quite wrong, against the law, no doubt. Olga was conscious of her responsibilities as an MP’s wife. Nevertheless, forewarned was forearmed, and there was nothing wrong with probing the mind of her former Nanny. As Glenys Forrester, excited as well as mystified, agreed to talk to Jemima Shore, Olga Carter-Fox blessed the magic persuasive powers of television.
Glenys Forrester did not scream or faint or do anything dramatic when Jemima Shore broke the news that a skeleton had been discovered in the cellar of Hippodrome Square. Jemima referred as euphemistically as possible to “an accidental death,” and an equally accidental discovery. She did not try to cover up Lady Imogen Swain’s involvement, but she simply did not mention any other names. At first Miss Forrester said nothing at all, merely pursing her lips again into that narrow line which reminded Olga vividly of the tyrant of the Hippodrome Square nursery. Then she flushed visibly beneath her pale powdery skin, but it was not until Glenys Forrester spoke that Jemima and Olga realised she was not so much shocked as intensely angry.
“That wicked selfish woman! I’m sorry, Olga, but your mother was one of the most selfish mothers I ever had the ill fortune to work for, never a thought for anyone else, no consideration whatsoever. And a wicked temper when no one was looking. That’s where you got your little black moods from. Sweetness and light to her friends, but very different where the nursery was concerned.” Miss Forrester paused for breath, then returned to the attack as the full enormity of what she had heard struck her.
“How dared she do that? With decent people and little children in the house?” The angry flush deepened. “So that’s why—everything locked up and sealed off. No one allowed in the cellars, some talk about damp, flooding, all lies of course. And the smell of paint! The smell of paint everywhere! It made me feel quite ill, and my poor little girls too. Why was there so much paint? She had the whole hall and dining-room repainted after one year, after all the trouble she’d taken with the previous colour, endless coats and varnishes. Now we had all the pots all over again, the smell of paint everywhere, and she never made a fuss, she, Lady Imogen, who was always so fastidious about smell, about anything like that.”
Jemima Shore thought about those baffling open tins of paint the old dried paint sloshed about in the outer cellar. She could imagine no better mask for some more sinister odour than the smell of fresh paint … nor apparently could Lady Imogen Swain. She must have done that herself if Burgo Smyth never visited the house again. His idea, her idea? Since Smyth had not mentioned it, possibly her idea, the brilliant notion of a woman whose great interest in life in those days, judging from her Diary, had been interior decoration—apart from parties and of course sex.
Glenys Forrester was now in full flood: “And when I started to ask questions—well, naturally I did, I had my little girls to look after—just like that, three months’ pay instead of notice. And off I was asked to go. The girls were heartbroken.” Miss Forrester stared at Olga as though daring her to contradict her. “I knew it was all wrong. But of course I thought it was all about … other things, never mind.”
“It’s a long time ago,” Jemima said gently. “What other things?”
“If Olga doesn’t mind—no, why should you? As Jemima says, it’s all a long time ago. Lady Imogen’s behaviour, I should call it. A married man too! With such a nice wife. I sometimes saw poor Mrs. Smyth at children’s parties. Naturally, I never said anything, I was just specially nice to the twins. And how well they’ve turned out, haven’t they? Archie Smyth, a proper young Englishman, not enough people like that now in the Conservative Party—”
“So you knew all about it? Lady Imogen’s affair. And that was why you thought she asked you to leave.” It was the persistently gentle but relentless voice of Jemima Shore Investigator.
“Of course I knew all about it,” Miss Forrester retorted. She added witheringly, “You can’t keep things like that from a Nanny, you know.” Jemima Shore had absolutely no difficulty in believing that. “Even though I was on my nursery floor,” Glenys Forrester continued, “and never let my little ladies go where they weren’t wanted.”
“I understand.” Jemima’s response was deliberately warm. “But a death in the house—I take it you wouldn’t have known anything about that at the time? Beyond being surprised at the fresh paint.”
“No, no, not a death, God save us!” Miss Forrester gave an artistic shudder. “But I knew there was something fishy, very fishy in that house. The way I was asked to leave so suddenly. It was all wrong. My instinct told me that. A Nanny’s instinct is never wrong.”
“Now, do you remember someone called Franklyn Faber coming to the house?”
Miss Forrester frowned. “The name is familiar. Why is it familiar?” Jemima did not enlighten her. “But no, I don’t remember him, and I should say that we didn’t have people like journalists coming to the house. Lords and ladies were more likely. And you may say where Lady Imogen was concerned, more lords than ladies.” The prurient note was back.
Jemima drove Olga Carter-Fox away from the depressing red brick house, built at the turn of the century, where Miss Forrester had her flat. She put on a tape of Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle singing a negro spiritual, to eliminate the need for conversation.
Olga was silent, staring ahead. As they approached Shepherd’s Avenue, Olga said, “Stop the car. I’ve something to tell you. I can’t say it in front of Elfi. It’s way after four o’clock. The au pair will have fetched her from school.”
Jemima switched off the glorious voices.
“I’ve learned something from visiting that ghastly woman. To think she was put in ‘sole charge’ of us, as they used to call it, dreadful phrase but accurate where my mother was concerned. Be that as it may … this is something about that night. The night he must have died. Something I knew all along but didn’t know I knew it.”
Olga looked at Jemima for the first time. She appeared to be extraordinarily tense and her dark eyes had that fierce expression which Jemima had noticed on their first meeting in the Irving Theatre. “Jemima, my sister Millie went downstairs that evening. I think it must have been that evening. She saw something. It’s nonsense what Nanny Forrester said about our never going downstairs. That’s what brought it back to me. Everyone tells lies. Including Nanny Forrester. She used to go to bed, in her own room, with the door open, and snore like an elephant. A sherry or two probably helped. She slept like a log; you could hear her a mile off. And then we used to go downstairs, something we were strictly forbidden to do. Which made it an adventure.”
Olga sighed. “How pathetic! When I think of Elfi, downstairs every night and we love to see her. Well, mostly we love to see her.” Olga smiled. “But for us, Millie and me, to go downstairs and spy on our mother was a great adventure.”
“What did Millie see? And how did you know?”
“Millie saw something: Madre and a man. I suppose it must have been Burgo. Millie adored Burgo. Several times Millie and I saw Burgo and Madre kissing. We thought it was horrid—sucking noises—we had to try not to giggle. Once he put his hand—well, you can imagine. We thought that was rude. At the same time Millie still loved Burgo. But that night it was different. I don’t quite know what Millie saw. ‘The man fell down. And Madre was angry.’ I remember that Millie was very frightened.
“But the next day Madre said it was all a horrid dream. Something that Millie had made up, because Millie was always telling lies in those days. And Millie must forget all about it. And if she didn’t, she would be sent away to a school for bad girls, and never see Madre or me again.
“And we had to forget about Burgo too. Burgo coming to the house. Because he was never coming back.” Olga’s voice became extremely quiet. “And I suppose he never did. I never saw him again until I was married to Harry. And then he just said, ‘Little Olga! I can’t believe it. Little Olga grown up into a fine lady!’ As though there had never been anything else between us, not my mother, not my childhood, not our ruined childhood.” Olga gave a little sob and covered her eyes.
“I’ll be in touch,” said Olga hurriedly. Then she opened the car door and jumped out before Jemima could say anything. Jemima watched her tall, slightly heavy figure scurrying down Shepherd’s Avenue towards her home. She wanted to call after her, “Do you realise what you’ve just said? That your mother killed Franklyn Faber, and Millie watched her?” Everyone tells lies … If this was the truth, it made Burgo Smyth an accomplice to murder or manslaughter, in terms of the law. But it also made him a chivalrous man who had acted to protect his mistress, in part at least.
Out of habit, Jemima bought the late edition of the Evening Standard in Holland Park Avenue before turning in towards her own flat. The election still dominated the news but, wrestling with this latest twist in the Faber Mystery, she barely glanced at the headline. In any case, she was dispirited by the way the Tories were once more drawing ahead. Then she saw the name of the Foreign Secretary: he was getting a particularly high rating for his handling of the inflammatory East European situation. Burgo Smyth was praised for such qualities as “unflappability, security, stability.” Horace Granville on the other hand was widely seen as “lightweight” and “uncommitted” (to politics). Stable, secure! If only they knew. But she, Jemima Shore, was not about to tell the world: which is when Jemima realised she sounded as sanctimonious as Nanny Forrester.
What Jemima did not notice until she was inside Holland Park Mansions was an item on the back page of the paper in the STOP PRESS. The word “theatre” caught her eye. It read, in smudgy type:
THEATRE DEATH FALL: Stagehand Henrietta Ann Vickers, 23, fell to death in Henry Irving West End theatre.
There was the item in all its sickening brevity. Jemima felt a horrible lurch in her stomach as if a physical blow had been dealt her. There were no further details—she combed the rest of the paper—and those that were given were not necessarily accurate. Stagehand indeed! Poor Hattie Vickers. But the actual death must be true enough. The cause of death, a fall, was also most probably accurate and the name of the theatre was correct.
Poor Hattie Vickers indeed: an image of her, with her cloud of honey-brown hair and her pretty honey-coloured skin, came before Jemima’s eyes. Along with the image there returned a memory of Hattie’s distressed chatter, her terrible day and so forth, on the evening Jemima had gone to the Irving.
Another death. Imogen Swain in Hippodrome Square and now Hattie Vickers at the Irving. Actually there were three deaths if you counted the death of Franklyn Faber, so recently revealed. Death three times over: what was the nature of the web which wove them together? Was there such a web? And if so, where and who was the spider?
Right at the centre of the web there had to be Imogen Swain; that was incontrovertible. Franklyn Faber had died in her house, either accidentally or as a result of some action on her part. Jemima decided to list some of the many questions which remained unanswered about all this.
First question: what is Faber doing in Hippodrome Square in the first place? The short answer is, keeping the appointment he mentioned to Laurel Cameron. Faber is not a friend of Lady Imogen’s, if Nanny Forrester is to be believed, and the nanny undoubtedly keeps a beady eye on the comings and goings in the house. Even more to the point, Lady Imogen’s name never features in Jemima’s media researches on the subject. But Franklyn Faber is a friend of Burgo Smyth, a close friend since Oxford days. And Imogen Swain, according to her diary, knows that Franklyn Faber can ruin Burgo.
You might think that Faber has gone far enough already, abstracting documents from Burgo’s briefcase, involving him in a secrets trial, but there has to be something else. Back to the lawyer Laurel Cameron and her interview with Jemima: quoting Faber’s own words that last night, when he seems to have an appointment, “They’re trying to make me a fall guy, Laurel” … “Not prison, if it’s a question of prison,” and “I’ve been betrayed, I never thought it would end with a betrayal.” Laurel Cameron simply assumes that it is a general betrayal by “the Establishment” and goodness knows that is a plausible scenario, and not because Laurel Cameron generally does discern these betrayals in her cases. But the discovery of Franklyn Faber’s body at Hippodrome Square alters the scenario. The appointment must be with Imogen Swain. And the betrayal has to be much more specific.
Logically, the person who had “betrayed” Franklyn Faber (in Faber’s opinion) has to be his old friend Burgo Smyth. What then was the true deal between them? Jemima recalled Laurel Cameron’s vituperative remarks to her (which for reasons of libel, had fallen on the cutting-room floor); Burgo Smyth talking in court about trust betrayed—that word again—and so forth, yet leaving unexplained the question of how Faber got hold of the document so easily. Supposing, just supposing, that Laurel Cameron is in this second instance perfectly right. Supposing Burgo Smyth has been in cahoots with Franklyn Faber, for some reason unknown, but then betrays him and allows him to take all the blame?
A phrase in Imogen Swain’s Diary floated into Jemima’s mind. She had of course not been able to destroy it, as ordered by Imogen’s heirs. Or rather Jemima had destroyed it technically, shredding the little volume in her office. But she had copied it on the photocopier, that silent late-twentieth-century spy. Jemima unlocked her safe and searched for the entry. She found it:
“February 3: … He’s never loved anyone like me, not Tee. That’s just because he thought an MP should be married. I’m the first woman he’s ever really loved. He never understood about loving women before he loved me. His shady past, we call it!”
Burgo Smyth and Faber: an early romantic connection? was it possible? a masculine love affair? well, why not? Burgo Smyth then marries the decent Teresa to keep himself on the conventional straight and narrow path, only to find himself swept away by passion for Imogen Swain. So, pursuing this train of thought, does Burgo Smyth tacitly connive at Franklyn Faber’s snitching of the documents? As for Franklyn Faber’s need for ten thousand pounds, which puzzles so many people who know him, including his lawyer Laurel Cameron, you have to remember that before the 1967 Act, closet homosexuals with a public position (Faber is a leading campaigning journalist) are hopelessly vulnerable to blackmail. This fits with Imogen Swain’s Diary once again. Faber knew something which could really ruin Burgo and bring about his “political death.”
So, however approximately, Jemima felt she might have the answer to the first question: Franklyn Faber is in Hippodrome Square at the request of Imogen Swain. An appeal? a deliberate trap? In the absence of the other Diaries, difficult to know. And there Faber dies, no question about that, not to be discovered for thirty years.
The second question is of course: how did Franklyn Faber die? Jemima decided to leave that aside for the time being. At least the concealment of his corpse was not an issue; Burgo Smyth had admitted to doing it, with the connivance of Imogen Swain.
So fast-forward thirty years. Imogen Swain begins to lose her memory, or, to be more accurate, reverts to her embarrassing memories of the past, hitherto well buried. And she has letters, Diaries … then she dies. Apparently accidentally.
Yes, that is the third big question: how and why did Imogen Swain die? You might begin by asking cui bono?, one of the few things Jemima remembered from frustrating Latin lessons at school. Who benefited? One obvious answer was Burgo Smyth, whose guilty secrets—sexual secrets of one sort and perhaps also another—she was beginning to spill. Yet Jemima could not help doubting whether Burgo Smyth himself had the opportunity to carry out such a deed let alone the inclination, which was another matter altogether. For one thing, given the Special Branch who had to guard him, even to arrive at Hippodrome Square unrecorded would have presented considerable logistic problems.
The younger generation was another matter. Sarah Smyth had paid visits to Hippodrome Square on her father’s behalf. As for Archie Smyth, he was definitely not a character of whom one could safely say that he wouldn’t harm a fly. Had they been out to protect their father? Politics was one of the worlds where the bubble reputation, that evanescent thing “a good name” was all important.
At this point Jemima stopped. She had an inkling that her thoughts had taken her down an important path. But she was brought right back to the subject of the Diaries. Where were they now? Millie Swain had entrusted them to Hattie Vickers at the theatre; there was general agreement about that. How had they disappeared? Who had access to the cupboard or safe apart from Hattie herself? Who had stolen them and why? Had they been destroyed by now? Above all, how had Hattie Vickers come to die: another very convenient demise? It was time—not before time—to make a call she had been meditating ever since the death of Imogen Swain. She had to talk to Chief Detective Superintendent John Portsmouth.
Jemima reached for the telephone. “Pompey,” she began, “do you fancy a drink? two drinks?”
“I’ve heard it said that drink loosens the tongue,” Pompey responded cautiously.
“My point exactly. And two drinks will loosen two tongues, mine as well as yours. Remember the Faber Case? You gave me some help with my research, we had a jar or two then. Now, I want to put a scenario to you. So you’ll have to do some more homework, legwork rather, for me, get the police to help you, that is me, with my enquiries. Two deaths, Pompey, one quite recent, one very recent, an old woman and a young woman, see what you can sniff out …”