“I’m sorry—um—” I couldn’t come up with any sort of coherent response that would smooth over the highly inappropriate fact that Madge and Tommy were in the bathroom together, both in a state of undress.
Madge shot a furious look at Tommy, then said, “No, we’re sorry to disturb you. You’d better come and let us tell you about it.” Madge turned away and went through the opposite door in the bathroom into a spacious room where she slipped on a pale green dressing gown.
Tommy made a motion indicating I should precede him into the bedroom. The velvet lapel of the dressing gown lay against his collarbone, leaving his neck and jaw exposed. The long red scratch stood out starkly against his pale skin.
I was still holding the lavender soap. I put it down on a table in my room, then walked through the steamy bath. I felt my face flushing at the awkward situation, and my velvet dress suddenly seemed too warm, but I certainly couldn’t shut my door and walk away—especially not after discovering the missing pages from Bankston’s notebook contained information about Tommy.
Madge gestured with the hairbrush she still held, indicating I should take the upholstered armchair, then she plopped down on the dressing table stool and spun around so that her back faced the mirror triptych. Tommy went to the far side of the room near the window and lit another cigarette.
Madge said, “It’s not nearly so scandalous as it seems. The long and short of it is that Tommy and I are married.”
“Married? But your wedding is in February.” The newspaper-reading public was fascinated with the two lawn tennis stars. Since they’d announced their engagement, I’d seen several articles about them and their upcoming wedding.
Madge aligned the edges of her dressing gown over her knees. “The wedding in February is all for show. We’ll be married twice over.”
Tommy, with his gaze on the blurry view out the fogged window, said, “We’ll have tied the knot good and tight.”
I looked from one of them to the other. “I’m sorry, but I’m frightfully lost. You’re married, but you’re having a wedding?”
Madge rotated the hairbrush handle as if it were a tennis racket. “Let me tell you the whole thing. Tommy and I did a mad, impulsive thing. We married last June. We were determined to do it despite the fact that my family didn’t welcome Tommy as a son-in-law. We had the banns read in a little church in London. I used my middle name, and Tommy used his real name.”
“Tommy Phillips is quite a common name.” His words had a bitter undertone to them.
“Don’t be like that, Tommy. It was a lovely day even though we did it in a hidden way.” Madge turned back to me. “Two charwomen were our witnesses. It was really quite romantic—a secret wedding.” She lowered her chin and looked up at him in a flirtatious way. The corners of his mouth went up, seemingly reluctantly.
Her face broke into a wide smile. She kept her gaze focused on Tommy as she spoke to me. “That’s why I love Tommy. He never stays upset for long.” They exchanged a look that made me feel quite like a gooseberry, but then Madge collected herself and turned back to me. The happiness went out of her expression. “We didn’t tell my family. Daddy would have cut up rough, and well—he threatened to cut me off when we announced we were engaged, so I’m sure he would’ve done it if he found out we were married. We decided to keep it quiet. With all the travel we do, it’s not been difficult to keep it from our families. But then in the fall, the situation changed.”
Tommy crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. “My sister became engaged to Kippy—Lord Higgenbotham. Now I am not a grasping fortune hunter, but a man with connections and expectations.”
Madge put the hairbrush on the table and crossed her arms. “My family did a frightful about-face. It was tacky of them, but it seemed to solve all our problems. The barriers were down. We could marry with my father’s blessing. He’d be quite put out if he discovered we’d deceived him. We decided to go along with my mother’s plans for a London wedding.” She sighed. “We didn’t realize there would be such an interest in the wedding. It’s all gotten rather out of control, what with the articles and the photographs. However, no one realized the truth about us.”
“Until Bankston found out about it,” I said.
Madge’s arms were still crossed, and her fingers tightened on her upper arms. “You know?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
That was a question I didn’t want to answer, so I countered with one of my own. “Does it matter? You have bigger issues to worry about, I think.”
Madge’s shoulders rounded, and she closed her eyes briefly. “Yes, that’s true. He had a copy of the marriage certificate. Of course, something had to be done. We couldn’t let him go to the newspapers.”
“So what did you do?”
She twitched her shoulder back and straightened her posture. “I paid him off.” She said it as if it were the most logical thing in the world. Her heavy brows came down. “It was Tommy who took an unnecessary risk.”
He shoved the ashtray away, and it skidded across the table and hit a lamp with a jarring clink. “If you think Scotland Yard won’t be thorough, then you’re the thick-headed one, Madge. I’m the one who’s saved us from being exposed.”
“So you broke into Bankston’s sitting room and tore the page about you out of his notebook,” I said. And probably took the copy of the marriage certificate as well since Jasper hadn’t found it in the desk.
Tommy caught his breath, but he recovered quickly. “That’s right—you saw me on the path near the window of his sitting room.”
“Yes, coming out of the bushes, although you tried to make it seem as if you’d wandered off the path because of the snow.”
Madge leaned forward and braced her hands on her legs. “Olive, please—you will keep our secret, won’t you?”
“That depends. I certainly don’t want to upset you or your family, but Bankston is dead.”
“But we had nothing to do with that. It was an accident, wasn’t it? The Scotland Yard investigation is a formality. That’s what everyone is saying—a horrible accident.”
Tommy had come away from the window and picked up a tennis racket that had been propped against the wardrobe. He swung it back and forth, his arm moving in an easy arc. “I wanted to rough him up a bit—let Bankston know he couldn’t threaten us and get away with it, but Madge talked me out of it.”
Madge nodded. “I did.” Her voice was firm, but I thought a flicker of concern crossed her face as she watched Tommy go through the motions of a backhand. This time, he whipped the racket through the air in a strong, decisive stroke.
Despite being on the other side of the room, I instinctively flinched. I’d thought Madge was the competitive one of the pair, but the power of his tennis stroke and the intense look on his face reminded me that Tommy was a fierce player in his own right. He spun the racket handle as Madge had spun the hairbrush. “In any case, old Bankston couldn’t have come to a better end, in my opinion.”