The Riddle of the River Read online

  He winced at my words.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I said.

  ‘Vanessa,’ he said, planting both hands on the table and leaning on them heavily. He looked at me hard, turned his head away, and then looked back at me again, with something like aggressiveness. ‘There’s something I have been trying to make you understand,’ he said. ‘I have to tell you this, I have to spell it out, because you don’t seem to understand it, and you must.’ There was an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘What?’ I said stimulatingly.

  ‘Ivy was a prostitute, for God’s sake!’ he cried. ‘What do you think she lived on? The shillings and pence she got from that half-cocked director? Find me an actress in this country who doesn’t do it, unless they have the luck to be born in an acting family. How else do you think they live? Not on their salaries, I can tell you! An unknown actress doesn’t even earn as much as a – as a servant, or a barmaid. There isn’t enough work in it. A barmaid who works twelve or fourteen hours a day may make four or five shillings a week and barely survive – so what do you think a girl can earn if she works only six or seven hours, and not every day, at that? And anyway – what kind of woman do you think gets up on a stage and shows herself half-naked to a hall full of people? What I keep trying to tell you is that it’s no bloody use your saying you want to find the people who knew Ivy. She had a hundred – clients – whose names she didn’t even know!’

  I remained silent for several moments. Was this, then, the true image of the Ivy I had been imagining so differently? Certainly, I had not perceived her as an angel of virtue. Her background was vague, and Mr Manning had described her manners as somewhat immodest. It had seemed clear enough that she was Mr Archer’s mistress, partly kept by him. He invited her to Cambridge, he bought her jewellery, their relations were transparent even to the shopgirl Estelle. But it was one thing to be the occasional mistress of an elderly man, and another to live as Ernest described. This was totally different, beyond my imagination. And it seemed incompatible with the little I knew of her life, her hard work as an actress, her modest, shared little room. Yet I remembered the drawer full of French corsets that no decent woman would wear…

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said timidly.

  ‘Of course,’ he snapped.

  ‘But how – how can you know such a thing?’

  ‘How do you think?’ he challenged me.

  I remained silent, rejecting and then accepting the obvious explanation.

  ‘Now, don’t start judging me,’ he said, with a raucous edge to his voice that made me feel most disinclined to judge anything. ‘You probably can’t even imagine how it was. I saw her on stage – I admired her, yes, I admired her to obsession. I must have seen her perform fifteen, twenty times, often in the same play, again and again, before I got up the courage to go and speak to her backstage. I had a note delivered: would she meet me? I – I wasn’t thinking of anything particular, you understand? I wasn’t thinking at all. I just wanted to meet her, to be near her. She accepted at once. She was friendly, familiar. Too familiar, really. I wasn’t at all sure whether I really liked it, at first. I thought I didn’t. I thought I would have wanted something different. Yet I kept going back. Finally – I don’t even remember how it happened – but we agreed to meet outside. And we did. I took her to a little restaurant…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Why am I telling you this?’ he said abruptly. ‘I wasn’t going to. I haven’t told a soul, not a single, solitary soul about this.’

  ‘You are telling me because I need your help to find her murderer,’ I said quietly. ‘I cannot work without knowing anything about her. I need answers to my questions.’

  ‘I probably can’t answer most of them,’ he said. ‘But you can try asking them. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Facts first,’ I said. ‘You saw her often?’

  ‘I – we – a number of times,’ he replied hesitantly. ‘But she stopped seeing me all of a sudden.’

  ‘Really? When was that?’

  ‘Two or three weeks ago. She suddenly asked me not to come backstage any more. I went to see her act several times, and I tried to speak to her, but she refused. Don’t ask me why, because I’ve no idea. She wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Did you guess? Did you have some theory?’

  ‘Well, it occurred to me that she had come into a source of money, somehow,’ he admitted uncomfortably. ‘I thought perhaps she had found a rich man to keep her, something of the kind. She did say something – something about beginning a completely new life. But she wouldn’t say what she meant.’

  I thought of Mr Archer, then of the pretty bedroom shared with Miss Wolcombe, and the newly purchased modest white underwear. Beginning a completely new life. I wondered why she had chosen to wear precisely those fresh, new undergarments to visit Mr Archer, rather than the flowered or black silk. I remembered my sharp suspicion, in the train, that after leaving his house, she had simply returned there. I still had to take up that matter with Inspector Doherty. Yet somehow, the petticoats seemed to speak up in denial of this idea. They told me that she had left his house for good.

  Not three weeks ago, Ernest was still seeing her. And then suddenly – nothing. It was strange.

  ‘I visited her lodgings today,’ I told him. ‘Did she – did she ever take you there?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘She took me to a flat,’ he said. ‘I think it might not have been the place where she actually lived. It was rather large and luxurious, but we never went into the drawing room or the other rooms. We – she used to – we only used to go into one room. I think it must have been the servant’s bedroom. It was next to the kitchen.’

  ‘The servant’s bedroom?’ I said, surprised. ‘Did she work there also?’

  ‘No, I’m sure she didn’t. In fact, I don’t think the flat was occupied. It was furnished, but there was never anybody there and it was never disarranged. I don’t know why she had a key.’

  ‘Where is the flat?’ I asked quickly. ‘We need to find out what she was doing there and to whom it belongs.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly – somewhere in Mayfair. I’m sorry. I would tell you if I could. But – it wasn’t very often. It wasn’t that far from Piccadilly, I think – in a block of rather modern flats. We used to go there in a hansom, just the two of us…and…well, I was paying more attention to her than to the streets. Recently, I wanted to find the flat, but I couldn’t remember how to get there. I hardly even remember what the building looked like, though I suppose I would recognise the entrance hall if I could go in. The trouble is, when I went there with her, my head was spinning so I just wasn’t conscious of anything around me.’

  ‘What made you suddenly want to find it again?’

  ‘She – she wouldn’t see me any more at the theatre. I, well, I wanted to stand in front of the house, watching, to see if she was going there with – someone else. I wanted to catch her, to force her to tell me why she didn’t want me any more. I thought I was going mad. The days seemed as long as weeks, months.’ He stopped and closed his eyes.

  ‘How much did she tell you about herself, about her life, her friends or family?’ I asked him.

  ‘Very little,’ he said. ‘She was not in the habit of talking about herself at all. I didn’t know where she lived, nothing about her past. I believe she told me she had no family. I don’t remember anything about friends, either, although – wait a moment. No, she did mention a friend. What did she say? It was nothing – I liked her hat, and she told me she had borrowed it from a friend. It’s not much, I know, but one could build on it. Somewhere out there is a girl who knew Ivy well enough to lend her a hat. She mentioned this girl once or twice. It wasn’t one of the actresses, for I knew them all. I think her name might have been Jenny. But I can’t remember anything more about her.’

  ‘But what did you talk about, all the time you were together?’

  ‘Well – did we talk? Yes, I suppose we talked at dinner, when – w
ell, Kathleen thought I was having dinner with my acting friends…well, I suppose I was. Oh, what nonsense. God, it’s awful, sordid.’ He passed his hand over his eyes, and continued abruptly. ‘Anyway, we only ever talked about the theatre. It’s my passion and it was hers. She told me how she had wanted to act ever since she was small, and I told her what I admired about her playing. We discussed interpretations of Shakespeare and other roles. She had an interesting grasp of characters. She told me that she knew immediately whether she would be able to play a role or not, and there were many that she couldn’t play. She said she had something inside that told her whether she could identify and be the character, or not. I learnt a great deal about acting from her, even though she considered herself a mere beginner. It was all fascinating for me. But I don’t see how it helps you.’

  ‘It does and it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘It does help give me a picture of the way she was. But I need more. More understanding, and more facts.’

  ‘I can’t think of any more facts. I’d give my right arm to know more, to know who killed her. You know that, don’t you? I’ve just given up my honour.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I observed crisply. ‘You haven’t given up your honour just by telling me about all this. Telling has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Then why does it feel exactly as though it does?’ he said. ‘I’ve felt a hundred times more ashamed telling you this than I ever felt while doing it.’

  ‘Something is wrong there,’ I remarked, ‘but I have no time to figure out what it is. It’s a job for someone in the church, not for me. What I want you to do is to identify the flat where you met her. You said it was near Piccadilly. Take a map and go up and down every single street on both sides until you find it. Peer inside every door. I’m going to look for ‘‘Jenny”.’

  1894

  Two young men emerged on the edge of the sun-drenched field which rolled away in front of the imposing stucco villa, to the cypress-covered hills in the distance. One of them thrust a tall pole decorated with a homemade white flag into his brother’s hands. A servant followed them, puffing under the weight of a large apparatus.

  ‘Run, run all the way to the other side of the field!’ he cried. ‘Giovanni will carry the stuff. Set it down on the other side, and as soon as you hear the signal, raise the flag, way up high so I can see it.’

  Thursday, July 7th, 1898

  This morning began rather dully. I ruminated over a gloomy sense of failure in the train to Cambridge, in spite of all that I had learnt. I had not been able to see Kathleen alone; she returned home quite late, and Ernest was present at breakfast. I could only stare at her, but for all that I did so, I could see nothing but a woman whose happiness and gaiety, while not intact, still held the upper hand in her temperament. Her attitude towards her erring husband was both tender and cheerful. Her kindness to myself, her friendship, the generosity with which she insisted on preparing a small lunch basket to carry on the train, all seemed to form a screen in front of my eyes behind which I was simply unable to perceive a murderess. Yet there is a motive there – and one which might be even deeper than it looks. Perhaps Ivy had written to her, demanding that she divorce her husband; perhaps Kathleen’s refusal to do so was the cause of Ivy’s recent coolness towards him. Maybe – although it wouldn’t square very well with the significant words beginning a completely new life.

  I tried in vain to resort to that basic element of the detective’s work: establishing the alibi. I asked her about her regular theatre nights and her other social activities, but there was no getting an accurate picture of her Tuesday evenings. Tuesday was her regular bridge night, she said, but before I could sigh with relief, she added cheerfully that as often as not, she didn’t go. And I felt uncomfortable asking directly about the 21st of June. I filed the bridge evening away in my mind for future reference if necessary.

  Before boarding the Cambridge train this morning, I did make another attempt to establish contact with the mysterious Miss Wolcombe, whom in my mind I had already identified with the ‘Jenny’ referred to by Ernest. I rose extremely early and made my way quickly to the house, hoping that the young woman would not yet be abroad. But I learnt from the landlady that she had packed her things and left already, late in the night.

  I found myself in a most annoying position. The landlady proudly displayed the empty, carefully swept room to my eyes; one of the beds had already been replaced by a small chintz-covered sofa.

  ‘Miss Wolcombe came last night, and I gave her your note,’ she explained. ‘She got all her things together at once—’ I did not say anything, but imagined clearly enough that the landlady had exerted strong and immediate pressure to obtain such a result, ‘and went off somewhere in a cab. I guess she had found new lodgings already.’

  ‘Did she not leave an address, for you to forward her post?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘She said to keep it for her, and she would come back in a little while for it.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘I quite wanted to make her acquaintance, because a friend of mine spoke to me recently of a young woman called Jenny Wolcombe. I thought it might be she. Is her first name Jenny?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she told me, a little surprised.

  ‘She must be the same person,’ I said. ‘Do you know if she has a profession?’

  ‘A profession? I don’t think Miss Wolcombe has a profession. She didn’t go out to work, if that’s what you mean. She had rather irregular hours. She even spent a day or two away from time to time, but other times, she would spend the whole day in her room, sometimes not even getting out of bed until evening. She had very strange habits; I’m not sorry she’s gone.’

  ‘And her friend who shared the room?’ I asked, following a sudden impulse. ‘Was she strange as well?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback. ‘Miss Elliott was all right. She was a theatre actress. A funny profession, that, strutting about like a peacock in fancy dress. But she was a nice enough creature. At any rate, she’s gone, they’re both gone, now. Are you going to bring your things here today?’

  ‘I have only this bag for today,’ I told her. ‘I need to bring down more things from Cambridge. Let me pay a week’s rent, and I will go up to Cambridge today and return as soon as I can.’ I rather reluctantly handed her five shillings, consoling myself with the notion that they should be considered as inevitable out-of-pocket expenses. And it did give me a place to stay next time I should come down to London. Ernest’s flat was becoming a most embarrassing place for me to be.

  I went up to the room, closed the door, and opened my small case upon the bed. Out came the combinations, the petticoat, the stays, the collar, the nightdress, the ribbons, the extra shoes in case it rained, the hairbrush and the pins. I laid them out on the bed and looked at them with the eye of a detective, interrogating them, asking them what they revealed about their owner. They looked back at me, reassuringly, neither too new nor used to excess, worthy and reliable, reasonably fashionable, yet not suggestive. I read from them an accurate picture of my own social status.

  I picked them all up and arranged them carefully in the wardrobe and in the drawers of the dresser. I ran my fingers to the very back of the latter as I did so, and peered underneath them as well, hoping against hope to find some further trace of her sojourn, some abandoned scrap, but there was nothing.

  Having thus taken possession of my new lodgings, I went out again, taking only Kathleen’s little basket, and making my way to Liverpool St, where I caught the next train to Cambridge, with a peculiar feeling of passing from one life to another. Once settled back in a corner seat with nothing to do, my frame of mind descended progressively into gloominess. I had lost all trace of Jenny Wolcombe, unless she chose to communicate with me in writing, and I had not succeeded in meeting anyone else who could tell me the kind of thing about Ivy Elliott that I really needed to know. Ernest, while giving me a piece of information which completely changed the fundamental basis of the problem, had also prov
ed incapable of furnishing me with the only concrete fact that, I felt, might truly lead me to the grasp of the circumstances of her daily life which alone could yield the solution of her murder: the address of the flat where she used to take him, and where it was to be assumed that she pursued that part of her professional life which was not devoted to acting.

  And as for what I had learnt about her from him, it only made things more difficult. He had used the word prostitute, a word which conveyed no real knowledge to me, which induced nothing more than the automatic reflex reaction of a high-minded shudder accompanied by the dutiful feeling of Christian pity which society has engraved into our mentalities, obscuring all efforts at true understanding.

  What do I know of the life of a prostitute, the mentality of a prostitute, the people and places frequented by a prostitute? How does one learn about such things? Had I encountered Ivy Elliott in life, would we, in reality, have exchanged even a single word? How, then, could I manage to perceive her voice and thoughts, after her death? I wanted to do so; I longed to do so. Could death, in a case such as this, remove rather than create a barrier?

  I suddenly remembered the séance – the table, shuddering and tilting under my fingers, and the strange knockings, and the young, wailing voice.

  ‘No, but that can’t have been real,’ I told myself firmly. ‘It must have been Mrs Thorne, moving the table with her knee or some such mechanism.’ Although I could not see how one could produce such movements, or such sounds, with one’s knee…and surely a famous physicist like Sir Oliver Lodge, well-known for his important researches on magnetic waves, could not possibly be taken in by crude, foolish trickery! I really did not know what to think. I gave up wondering about it, and determined to ask Arthur’s opinion as soon as I should arrive home.