As Joe went towards the telephone he heard her whisper to Lily, ‘The prince and Oliver were close, you know. “Matloes” both, as they like to call themselves. Oliver was his mentor at one point in his training days at Dartmouth.’
‘This could well be for me,’ said Sandilands apologetically, picking up the earpiece. ‘I asked my super to contact me here.’
‘Good. Your Mr Hopkirk. Nice man. Look, while you’re busy, may I borrow Miss Wentworth? No time to waste. It occurs to me that she can hear my account while I’m having a bath and struggling out of my cocktail dress and into my mourning clothes.’
The earpiece in his hand, Joe turned to smile his acquiescence. This was going better than he could have expected. He just hoped Wentworth could hold her nerve and make the most of the chances unexpectedly on offer. He was beginning to see the advantages of sending in a woman detective. He was an effective officer himself but there were limits — he conceded that he could never pursue his female witnesses into the bathroom and boudoir. He breathed deeply and censored the image of Cassandra shaking loose her long auburn hair and slipping out of her silken underpinnings.
To distract himself he barked into the telephone: ‘Hopkirk? That you? Where’ve you got to?’
Cassandra set off upstairs, calling over her shoulder to the maid who had lingered on in the hall, waiting for instructions. ‘Eva, see that the commander has whatever refreshment he needs, will you? And we’ll have a tray of coffee brought up to my room, in about ten minutes.’
‘Excellent idea, Lady Dedham,’ Wentworth said, picking up the gloves from the hall table and following the widow upstairs.
Lily perched uneasily on the edge of a spindle-legged French chair in Lady Dedham’s sumptuous bedroom. The curtains were drawn, a discreet lamp or two lit, and Lily was glad of the concealing gloom as Cassandra began to struggle out of her bloodstained clothes. She averted her eyes as her ladyship, swearing gently, unhooked, unbuttoned, tugged and pulled at her evening dress with hands too weary to obey her satisfactorily. She’d refused the services of her maid. ‘Don’t worry, Adèle, if I get stuck Miss Wentworth can help.’
The girl had withdrawn, casting an astonished and very unfriendly glare at Lily.
Lady Dedham hadn’t asked for help and Lily had to sense when the moment of unbearable frustration came. She moved swiftly forward to undo the hooks and eyes on the back of the French camisole and, as Cassandra stepped out with relief, Lily bent and gathered up the heap of crumpled finery, intending to hand it over to Adèle who, she guessed, would have lingered outside but just in earshot. The ghost of an exotic flower scent still lingered in the peach silk underclothes and it was this final flourish of a vanished age — an Edwardian decadence, carefree and indulgent — that made Lily swallow and blink with emotion. Slipped off in a moment were the silk and gardenias; the widow’s weeds waited in readiness. And there they were — the weeds — black garments selected from the wardrobe by the careful maid and laid out, smelling unpleasantly of mothballs, in an uninviting pool of darkness on a chest at the foot of the bed.