Murder at Renard's (Rose Simpson Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  ‘Do we know what started the fire?’

  ‘A candelabra, sir. Someone in their wisdom saw fit to place it near the curtains. A damned silly thing to do, if you ask me. Someone must have knocked it and one of the lighted candles happened to catch the curtain. The shopkeeper swears blind that it couldn’t have caught fire by itself. Most particular about it, she was.’

  ‘It sounds as if it would have been easy to deliberately set the drape alight if anyone was so minded,’ said the inspector. ‘All someone would need to have done was pull up some of the fabric and hold the material over one of the candles.’

  ‘Yes, and if the person positioned himself in front of the candelabra, it needn’t have been obvious what he was doing,’ agreed the sergeant.

  ‘If they didn’t think anyone was looking, they might even have taken a chance and moved the candelabra nearer to the curtains.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that have been a bit risky, sir? Surely someone would have spotted them doing that.’

  ‘Not necessarily, not if all eyes were on the mannequin parade at the time.’

  ‘Well, apparently the girl had just appeared in rather a spectacular gown by all accounts. Stayed there in the room for only a few minutes, she did, before disappearing, presumably back to the dressing room.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have a better idea what happened when we’ve seen the place and interviewed anyone who is still there. You never did give me the name of the deceased, by the way, Sergeant.’

  ‘The deceased’s a Sylvia Beckett, sir. She was one of the shop assistants, like I said. Bit of a shame really. Apparently she was very excited about modelling the gowns. It was a last minute decision, I understand. The mannequin was supposed to have been Lady Lavinia Sedgwick, but she pulled out at the last minute.’

  ‘Lady Lavinia Sedgwick?’ The inspector looked up, surprised.

  ‘Yes, sir. Have you heard of her? Her photographs are always in the society pages. Quite a looker she is too. Her brother’s the Earl of –’

  ‘Belvedere, yes, I know. I’ve met her. Him too, come to that.’

  ‘Have you really, sir? You’ll be telling me next that they were suspects in one of your murder investigations.’

  ‘As it happens, they were,’ said the inspector, grinning at the expression on the sergeant’s face. ‘Now, who’s still at the dress shop, the proprietor, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, perusing the papers on his lap. ‘A Madame Renard, hence the name of the shop. Then there’s her son, Jacques Renard, works at Harridges, he does. Then there’s a Monsieur Girard, he’s the designer, whatever that is, and then the two shop assistants … now, what are their names? Ah, here we are, a Miss Jennings and a Miss Simpson.’

  ‘Miss Simpson?’ The inspector sat up in his seat with a start. ‘What’s her Christian name? It’s not Rose by any chance, is it?’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Sergeant Perkins, studying his notes. ‘Well, there’s a thing. You’re quite right, sir. Fancy you knowing that. The young lady is a Miss Rose Simpson. Don’t say you’re acquainted with her too, sir?’

  ‘I am,’ confirmed his superior. ‘Or at least, I have been.’ For a moment, he appeared to the sergeant to be lost in thought.

  ‘You’ll be telling me next, sir, that she’s been involved in your murder investigations too.’

  ‘She has. Now, don’t gape at me like that, sergeant, it’s far from becoming. Hello? We’ve stopped. We must be there. Bring your notes with you, will you, Perkins, there’s a good fellow.’

  The inspector climbed out of the car, followed by his sergeant, his notebook at the ready. Both policemen surveyed the exterior of the dress shop with interest.

  ‘It doesn’t look the sort of place there’d be a murder, does it, sir?’ said Sergeant Perkins, pressing his nose against the window, trying to make out the interior of the shop through the gap left by the burnt drape. ‘Still, I suppose you can never tell. My old man told me of a stabbing that had occurred in a tearoom once. Ever so respectable a place it was too. Full of little old ladies at the time having their afternoon cups of tea, it was …’

  The sergeant’s idle chatter faltered and dwindled into nothing, as he became increasingly aware that his superior was giving what he was saying absolutely no notice at all. Instead, he was staring intently at the shop, as if its very existence intrigued him. And when he spoke, it was so quietly, as if he were speaking to himself. The sergeant had to take a step or two towards him to catch his words.

  ‘So this is where Rose works, is it? Well I never.’

  Rose rubbed her eyes and tried to stifle a yawn. She was sitting on one of the chairs that, until an hour or so ago, had been occupied by a member of the audience. She dimly remembered that she had secretly coveted such a seat, standing as she had been with her aching feet. Now though, she longed to get up and stretch her legs. This sudden, overpowering tiredness she felt, she knew had nothing to do with the physical exertions of the day. It was something much deeper than that, which threatened to engulf her if she allowed herself to submit. It was the combination, she thought, of the shock and then the waiting. It seemed they had been waiting for ages, although in truth it had not been so very long at all.

  They had given their preliminary statements to the first policemen on the scene, and now they were required to wait for the gentlemen from Scotland Yard to arrive to take more detailed statements. Only then would they be permitted to go home and sleep. However, bitter experience told her that, never mind how tired she was, sleep would elude her. She would not be able to close her eyes without seeing Sylvia as she had seen her last, sprawled out upon the floor, her hair dishevelled and matted by blood, a pair of small gold scissors protruding from her neck; the very same scissors that Rose had picked up and admired only a short time ago. She remembered Sylvia had liked the scissors too, had gone so far as to comment on how pretty they were with their bird design. It seemed even more awful somehow that she should have been killed with an object that she had praised and wished was her own. So much better if it had been something else, although Rose knew she was being stupid and sentimental. Because what was at issue was not the weapon that had been used to kill Sylvia, the salient point was that she was dead, and had been murdered at that. But who’d have thought, Rose mused, that such a dainty object could have caused such damage? It was almost unbelievable to think that such a delicate looking object could have been used for such a foul purpose as to take another person’s life.

  She glanced around the shop. The silence seemed eerie and unreal somehow after the noise and bustle associated with the fashion show. The shop itself showed signs that it had been hastily abandoned as a result of the audience fleeing from the fire. The small clusters of seats were now in disarray, with a number of the chairs on their sides where they had been knocked over in the ensuing rampage. The counters and occasional tables had also not gone unscathed. Some of their contents had scattered onto the floor, where they had been trampled and ruined or broken underfoot. The odd object remained intact, a brooch here, a scarf there, and such items seemed strangely out of place amid the destruction. The great drapes, which had contributed so much to the chaos of the evening, still adorned the windows. They succeeded in blocking out the night, although in places they had become detached from the hooks that secured them, and drooped and sagged like giant wilting flowers. The offending charred curtain itself lay torn and blackened on the floor, a sad reminder of how and when the evening had begun to deteriorate, although few if any could have imagined the devastating way it was to end.

  Rose was roused from her reflections by the sound of whimpering, not dissimilar to that of a wounded animal. She looked up to see Mary, sitting a few chairs away from her, her eyes red and swollen from crying, and a general unkempt look about her, accentuated by her hair which had become undone from its fastenings. Strands of it fell across her eyes, and in places was plastered to her face by tears. The girl had her arms clasped tightly about her, her body rocking sli
ghtly in an involuntary movement. Every now and again she paused to sniff and wipe her nose on the sleeve of her blouse. Rose did not take the trouble or spare the time to dart a quick glance at Madame Renard, to see if the proprietor had noticed her employee’s dishevelled appearance or erratic behaviour. Instinctively Rose took a woollen shawl from within the nearest counter and moved her chair so that she could sit beside the weeping girl. Putting an arm around her shoulders, she handed her one of the embroidered lace handkerchiefs lying on display on the nearest occasional table. Gently she stroked the girl’s hair, while encouraging her to mop her eyes and blow her nose while she arranged the shawl around her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary. I hadn’t really thought what an awful shock all this must have been for you. It was frightful for us all, of course, but it must have been much worse for you.’

  ‘Because we were particular friends, you mean?’ said Mary between sniffs. Her voice sounded weary, as if she found it a struggle to talk, and was barely audible. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s the shock that makes me feel like this. I can’t believe it’s happened; it doesn’t seem real. How can Sylvia be dead, Rose?’ She tugged at the other woman’s arm as if she believed Rose held the answer. ‘And murdered too! Oh … it’s all so horrible. And here of all places. Renard’s! Rose, to think that it was only a few hours ago that she was ribbing me about having to wait on everyone while she pranced around the room, all eyes on her. I was that cross too, Rose. I said some spiteful things to her. Now I wish I hadn’t. I wouldn’t have said them if I’d known …’ Mary’s voice faded and a fresh bout of weeping overcame her.

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ said Rose soothingly. ‘And we all say things we regret. Sylvia could be very unkind at times.’

  ‘Yes, she could,’ agreed Mary. ‘Sometimes she could be hateful. But that someone hated her so much they did more than just wish she was dead, they actually killed her.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Rose. ‘Try not to think about it, Mary. It’ll only upset you even more than you are already.’

  ‘Can I tell you something, Rose? It’s been eating away at me, and I know I can trust you. I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her one little bit. She thought I was her friend, but I wasn’t. I pretended that I was, but I wasn’t. I was always a little scared of her. I wanted her gone, but not like this. I hoped she’d get a better job and leave Renard’s. Or perhaps get married. But sometimes, Rose I prayed that something … something awful would happen to her.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean, Mary?’ Rose gave the girl a sharp look and removed her arm from her shoulders.

  ‘An accident, perhaps. I thought, if only she could fall down some stairs or be run over by an omnibus.’

  ‘Mary!’

  ‘I know, it’s awful, isn’t it, that I could have had such thoughts? But I couldn’t help it, I tell you.’ Mary bent her head towards Rose and whispered: ‘Sometimes I even thought about killing her myself. I thought about the different ways I might do it. But I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to go through with it. Don’t look at me like that, Rose. I didn’t do it, I swear I didn’t. Because in the end I didn’t need to; because someone else did it for me.’ She laughed, and to Rose, who looked at her appalled, she sounded a little insane.

  Madame Renard, herself distraught, looked across at her two employees. Mary, she thought, looked especially distressed, as well she might, Sylvia being her particular friend. Like the two girls, the proprietor was sitting on one of the chairs vacated by the audience, although her instinct was to get up and pace the floor, her bangles jangling on her arms in a comforting manner, as she wrung her hands to express her agitation. The presence of her son, however, sitting beside her, holding one of her hands absentmindedly in his while he stared at the floor, was enough to restrain her from rising from her seat. It would have been futile anyway, she reasoned, for there was nowhere to go other than walk back and forward in this one room. Even had she been permitted to leave the shop, she could not have done so, for it was as much a part of her as her son.

  No, that wasn’t quite true, of course. Nothing was as dear to her as her own beloved Jacques. Everything she had done, she had done for him. And what hadn’t she done? She could not bring herself to dwell too long on the measures that she had taken to protect him, the steps she had put in place so that he would never know. She stared around the shop, her own dear shop that she had built up from nothing to be his inheritance. It had taken every ounce of her strength and determination, and she had suffered setback after setback, but in the end she had succeeded and made it what it was. It was difficult to look about her now and not feel a sense of repulsion because of what had taken place tonight. Yet she knew that she must overcome the urge to retch and recoil from it. This shop was her sanctuary after all, her little kingdom, even if it was now contaminated and tainted by the girl’s death. In time, she hoped she would feel nothing, or very little, but how long would it take until she reached that feeling? Would she ever be able to bring herself to sit at her desk, in her office, in the very knowledge that it was there that Sylvia had met her violent death? She shuddered. She must not think of it; if necessary she could change the layout of the shop and place her office somewhere else. Perhaps that would be for the best anyway, regardless of her personal feelings. It would be far better for business if her customers could not visualise the crime every time they entered her shop. How awful would it be to catch them whispering and pointing to the door of her office and hear them saying: ‘That’s where it happened!’

  The proprietor stifled a sob, whether for Sylvia’s plight or for her own potentially ruined business, she could not say. She looked instead out of the corner of her eye, beneath heavily blackened eyelashes, at her son. She wondered how he was taking Sylvia’s death. She could not deceive herself. She was distinctly worried about him. It was not helped by it being so difficult to ascertain how fond of Sylvia he had been. There had been a time when she had been sure he loved her, but that was some time ago. His mouth, she noticed, was set in a grim straight line, and he was very quiet, which was not at all like him. In fact he had barely uttered a word on being informed of Sylvia’s death. Instead he had pushed past herself and Rose, in the rudest of fashions, to check the girl’s pulse as if he doubted their word or did not think them capable of undertaking such a task themselves. One look at the girl’s face, however, had been enough to tell him she was dead. How unfortunate that he had now averted his gaze and she could not see his eyes. She wondered whether they were moist with unshed tears. Perhaps more importantly, she wondered if he was afraid.

  She looked up and saw Marcel Girard doing what she longed to do, pacing the room in an absentminded, dejected fashion, every now and then coming back to lean a hand on the back of Jacques’ chair and bending down, as if to enquire how he was, but saying nothing. Perhaps the designer thought he would be intruding on his friend’s grief. Madame Renard stared at him and tried to ascertain his emotions from the expression on his face. But his visage was strangely blank, devoid of any tangible sentiment, his feelings hidden.

  She closed her eyes and her thoughts floated back unbidden to the moment when they had first discovered Sylvia’s body spread-eagled on the floor. She remembered how initially she had not comprehended what she was seeing, and for one blissful moment even wondered whether the figure was merely sleeping and not dead. She remembered too the horror she had felt on believing it to be Lady Celia lying murdered on her floor, and the momentary relief she had experienced on discovering that it was the shop assistant’s body she was staring at. She had made a mistake, such an awful mistake, and she blushed now from the memory, although surely it was impossible for anyone to guess her thoughts.

  Thinking of the body made her think of Rose, in particular, the way she had admonished Jacques for pushing past them, telling him in vain that he must not touch anything until the police had arrived … Rose! How very stupid of her not to have thought of it before. Madame Renard chided herself for her own stupidity. Why hadn’t i
t occurred to her? This was not the first time that the girl had experienced violent death. Why, to her knowledge, Rose had been involved in at least three murder investigations and, unless the bits of gossip she had gleaned were untrue, had played a pivotal role in solving each case. Madame Renard sat up in her seat. For a moment she did not know whether to be relieved or afraid. She must decide what to do.

  However, before the proprietor had the opportunity to do anything, the uniformed constable, who all this time had been present, standing discreetly at the very edge of the room, leapt forward from his position by the window and opened the shop door. Out of the darkness emerged two men. Madame Renard assumed from their appearance, and by the deferential way the constable spoke to the older of the two in particular, that these were the gentlemen from Scotland Yard. As if to confirm the accuracy of her reasoning, she saw Rose jump up from her seat so hurriedly that she almost overturned her chair. The girl ran forward, her arms outstretched, as if she meant to embrace the older of the policemen. Perhaps at the last minute she thought better of it, for suddenly she stopped and hesitated. She remained where she was, hovering rather awkwardly. Her face, however, had erupted into a smile and her eyes were shining.

  ‘Detective Inspector Deacon,’ Rose cried. ‘I’m so glad it’s you.’

  Chapter Eleven

  It had been only a few months since Rose had last seen Inspector Deacon, and yet the thought struck her most forcibly that he had aged considerably in that time. Dark-haired and tall, he was still a rather handsome man, but his face was paler than she remembered, and there were lines at the corner of his eyes and etched out on his forehead that had not been there before. It was to be expected, she told herself, after what had happened. For she knew for a fact that the inspector had been shot during the course of investigating a burglary. It had been feared that his wounds would prove fatal, but he had pulled through and undergone a lengthy period of recuperation. It stood to reason, therefore, that he had only recently returned to his duties. Was it surprising then if he was not fully recovered and was finding his work tiring?