‘YES, ANGUS. I SEE. No, really, I understand. Not at all, Angus—I was happy to be of help. Yes, of course I’ll give you a full report when I get back. By the way, are you feeling any better?’
Madden listened with the receiver pressed to his ear; and then, like Chubb earlier in the day, he winced.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Helen did say it might take some time to wear off.’
Again he was silent as he listened to the voice at the other end of the line.
‘Quite so. It sounds most unpleasant. We’ll talk again very soon. Goodbye for now.’
As he replaced the receiver Madden looked up and saw that his daughter, Lucy, was standing at the bottom of the stairs listening. He hadn’t heard her come down from her bedroom upstairs. She was shaking her head.
‘Poor Angus.’
‘Yes, poor Angus.’ Madden scowled. ‘But he’s certainly making a meal of it.’
‘You’re being very hard-hearted,’ she observed piously.
‘Am I?’ Madden led the way into the sitting-room. ‘According to your mother he’s the worst patient she’s ever had, and I can believe it. I thought he’d be pleased when I told him I was going down to Kent tomorrow. Not a bit of it. He said I should have been more insistent with Chubb, made him see reason.’
‘Poor Angus.’
‘Will you stop saying that?’ Madden caught her eye and she laughed. He stood back to take in her appearance. ‘What a lovely dress. Did you make it yourself?’
‘Sort of.’ Lucy turned slowly about so that he could appreciate the full effect of the tight-waisted, bouffant garment. Cut well below her knees in the so-called New Look—a fashion that like so many had come from Paris (and been much derided by killjoys when it first appeared as a waste of scarce material)—it swirled about her graceful figure in a shimmering blue wave. ‘It’s an old evening dress of Mummy’s which I cut down and made some alterations to. Can you remember her wearing it?’
‘Yes, now that you mention it.’ Madden’s gaze softened. ‘You’re really very good at this. Are you going to make a career of it?’
It was more than a year now since Lucy had come up to London with the idea of finding a job and, to her parents’ surprise, had accepted a lowly position in the salon of a well-known dress designer (somewhat to the disappointment of her mother, who still nursed the hope that her unpredictable daughter might eventually realize she had a good mind and try for university).
‘But that’s what I’m doing in a way.’ Lucy had sought to console her. ‘I’m studying, learning things. I’m a bit of a dogsbody at the moment, but that’ll change, you’ll see.’
‘Perhaps I’ll have a famous daughter one day.’ Madden mused agreeably on the thought. ‘We’ll all be invited to view the new Lucy Madden collection.’
‘You never know. It might happen.’ Lucy was busy checking her reflection in the mirror above the mantel. ‘I feel I’m abandoning you tonight,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’
‘I expect I’ll manage. I’ve got Alice to look after me.’
‘Dear Alice. She hardly knows what to do with herself now that Aunt Maud’s gone. She talks to me about her all the time.’
It was the recent death of Helen’s aunt—and Lucy’s great-aunt—Maud Collingwood that had brought Madden to London. Surviving well into her nineties, the old lady had passed away peacefully in her bed—as she had always sworn she would—two months earlier, and when her will was read Helen and Madden found that she had left them her house in St John’s Wood.
‘It’s not that surprising, I suppose—I was her closest living relative—but what on earth are we going to do with it?’
For a while Helen and her husband had toyed with the idea of renting the house. But the problems of absentee landlordism had finally persuaded them to sell it.
‘We can use the money to buy a flat which Lucy can use,’ Helen had pointed out. ‘And it can be somewhere for Rob to stay as well when he’s in London.’ Their son, a naval officer, was presently serving on a cruiser in the Indian Ocean.
The decision having been made, Madden had set himself the task of finding an estate agent to handle the sale and of disposing of such furniture as they did not wish to keep, while Lucy, who had been camping with friends in an over-crowded flat in Knightsbridge, had moved to St John’s Wood.
‘I’d rather not leave Alice in the house on her own,’ Helen had explained.
Aunt Maud’s long-time maid and companion, Alice Penny, had made plans to spend her retirement with her sister and brother-in-law at Hastings, on the south coast, but her move had been delayed by the alterations that would have to be made to their home before they could take her in. In the interim, Helen had insisted that she remain in her late mistress’s house, and Alice in turn had decided that she would continue to serve as cook and maid there for as long as the Maddens might need her.
Lucy, meanwhile, was busy in front of the mirror putting last-minute touches to her make-up.
‘Could you help me with my dress, Daddy? It’s those buttons at the back. They’re so hard to reach. I don’t know how Mummy used to manage. Did she have a maid to help?’
‘I should think so. People did in those days.’
Madden came up behind his daughter and began the painstaking job of fitting each small cloth-covered button into its appropriate slit. Glancing at the mirror he saw their faces—Lucy’s fresh glowing complexion and his own weathered visage where the lines around his eyes were deeply carved now and his dark hair streaked with grey. As always in summer, when his skin grew tanned, the scar on his forehead—a legacy of the months he had spent in the trenches during the First World War—showed white against the brown skin. She caught his eye in the mirror and smiled.
‘When you took me to dinner at Rules the other night we were spotted by a friend of mine, Polly Manners. She rang me the next day wanting to know who my madly attractive escort was and did I know any other fascinating-looking older men like him I could introduce her to.’
‘Madly attractive!’ Madden spluttered. ‘What a ridiculous thing to say. And you’re much too young to be thinking about older men.’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what’s called a contradiction in terms?’
She kissed him on the cheek, and then stood back to examine her reflection in the mirror.
‘Don’t wait up for me. I won’t be back till late.’
‘Dancing till dawn again, are you?’
Madden regarded his lovely daughter wistfully. Lucy had inherited not only her mother’s looks but so many of her mannerisms that there were times when he seemed to be seeing Helen in her youth reborn in the golden-haired girl before him.
Lucy shook her head. ‘You keep forgetting I’ve got a job. I have to get up in the morning. You’re confusing me with Mummy. It was she and Violet who used to dance the night away. Literally. Violet has told me all about it, how they would gather in Piccadilly at the end of a ball to have breakfast at one of those mobile kitchens. “Ah, the times your mother and I have seen the sun come up over Green Park.”’
One of Helen’s oldest friends, Lady Violet Tremayne was a fixture of Highfield life.
‘Of course Mummy denies it furiously. She says Violet exaggerates everything. But I know which one of them I believe.’
Lucy put on her wrap.
‘I wish I were staying in with you tonight. I’d much rather hear about this case of Angus’s and what happened at Scotland Yard today. You must promise to tell me all about it when you come back from Kent. I want to know what you find out—every last detail.’
To Madden’s surprise, when he had told his daughter about the mission Sinclair had entrusted him with she had reacted instantly to one of the names he had mentioned.
‘The Portia Blake murder! Of course I remember that. When I was at St Clare’s we used to smuggle copies of the News of the World into the dormitory and read it by torchlight under our sheets. She was an actress, wasn’t she? She looked lovely in her photographs. It was awful to think of her being strangled that way.’
In the course of her chequered scholastic career Lucy had spent some months at a boarding-school in Dorset, one from which her parents had hurriedly removed her when it became apparent from letters received from the headmistress that she was about to be expelled for persistent misbehaviour.
‘We always thought there was more to it than met the eye, the other girls and I. The trouble was the police made an arrest almost at once. It was over so quickly.’
At that moment the bell rang—it was the taxi she had rung for earlier—and Madden accompanied his daughter to the front door.
‘Oddly enough, that’s exactly what Angus says,’ he told her as she kissed him goodnight.