Frobisher found himself having trouble keeping up with all this information. She had a very rapid style of conversation. She seemed full of energy and amusement, it was an unusual thing to encounter in his own office. It threw him rather. “Do you perhaps have a photograph of either girl?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said, hitting her forehead with the palm of her hand. (She was quite expressive for a librarian. Almost Italian. The word “librarian” had previously conjured up an image of a vinegary spinster, not the animated creature before him.)
“What an idiot I am not to think of that!” she said. “I’ll ask Cissy to send me one of Freda in the morning’s post. I’m sure she’ll be able to get hold of a photograph of Florence as well. Her parents are desperate, but I’m afraid Freda’s mother was rather glad to be rid of her.”
“Are these girls capable of fending for themselves?”
“As I said, Florence is rather young for her age.”
“And Freda?”
“Quite the opposite, I’m afraid. I do have a note that Freda left behind for her mother but I don’t think you’ll find it much use.” She took a piece of creased pink notepaper from her bag and passed it over his desk.
“Dear Mother,” Frobisher read aloud. “I have run away to London to seek my—what’s that word, Miss Kelling?”
“Fortune.”
“To seek my fortune. I am going to dance on the stage. The next time you hear from me I will be—?”
“Famous. Her handwriting is atrocious. There’s an exclamation mark after ‘famous,’?” she added. “You’ve made fame sound very pedestrian, Chief Inspector. It’s a word that seems to demand a sparkle.”
Frobisher ignored this remark. It seemed safest. He was never sure how to respond to mockery, even the mildest kind, and certainly not from a woman. Nor was he sure how to put a sparkle on a word. Or indeed on anything. Instead he continued to read doggedly from the pink notepaper. It was impregnated with something rather unpleasant.
(“Scented geranium, I think,” Miss Kelling said. )
“I will be famous. You don’t need to worry about me. Sincerely, your daughter, Freda.”
A note was better than no note, Frobisher supposed. Girls who left no note walked through a door and disappeared into thin air. Girls who wrote notes left some evidence behind. A note had purpose behind it.
“Seek my fortune,” he murmured thoughtfully, handing the pink notepaper back. He supposed he could send a constable round the dance schools—they were likely places to find girls who were “seeking their fortune” on the stage.
In London, he told Miss Kelling, dancing girls were an industry, “churned out like steel or coal, I’m afraid.” There was an enormous number of dance schools on Frobisher’s patch. The majority of girls who “graduated” had no hope of making it into a theatre and finding the fame they craved so badly. Instead, they were siphoned off into the nightclubs or sent abroad to dance and were often never heard from again. Some ended up on the street, of course. Or washed up on the banks of the Thames, fished out at Wapping and Deptford. Or Tower Bridge. He didn’t mention those ones to Miss Kelling.
“And what do the girls do in the nightclubs?” she asked. “I’m from York—I’m not sure we have nightclubs.”
“The girls are paid to dance with the customers,” Frobisher said. “They’re called ‘hostesses’.”
“That sounds rather like…”
“Exactly. The worst are Nellie Coker’s clubs. They seem to eat girls. Mrs. Coker’s ‘Merry Maids,’ as they’re known. Interpret that as you will.”
And that was when Frobisher was struck by an idea.
“Miss Kelling? I have a proposition for you.”
* * *
—
“Infiltration, Chief Inspector?”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s the word I would use. It seems a little dramatic—perhaps ‘reconnoitring’ would be more accurate. Just for one evening, Miss Kelling. In the Amethyst, Nellie Coker’s biggest club. Her command post, you might say. I’ve no female constables in Bow Street at the moment. I need someone who wouldn’t look entirely out of place.”
“Entirely?”
“Be my eyes and ears for the night. Tell me if you see anything untoward. And, who knows, perhaps you’ll spot one of your missing girls.”
She barely wavered. “Very well, why not? With you?”
“Me?” He was alarmed by the idea and said hastily, “No, no, not me. I’ll arrange for someone to escort you. I must warn you, Miss Kelling, the club is a den of iniquity, you may come across behaviour that might shock you.”
“I nursed throughout the war, Chief Inspector, I doubt there is anything left on earth that could shock me any more. Shall I assume a false name, an alias?”
He had not expected her to be quite so eager. “That won’t be necessary, Miss Kelling. You must exercise caution, it is very easy to be seduced by these people.” He hesitated and then said, “If you are willing, the matriarch, Nellie Coker, the so-called Queen of Clubs, is being released from Holloway prison tomorrow morning. Why not accompany me to watch the spectacle?”
“Will it be a spectacle?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Excellent. I am keen on spectacles, I have not had enough lately. And now I should go,” she said. “I have taken up enough of your valuable time. I am off to do some shopping and sightseeing.”
“Sightseeing? Do you have a Bartholomew’s? You will need one. Oh, and…”—a thought struck him—“you will need an evening gown for the Amethyst, Miss Kelling. Do you have one with you?”
“Absolutely, Chief Inspector.”
“Just ‘Inspector’ will do, Miss Kelling.” He imagined her calling him John. It distracted him so much that he stood up abruptly and said, “I shall make arrangements, then. I shall send word to…?”
“The Warrender. In Knightsbridge. I am all anticipation, Inspector.”
Nightbirds
“Where’s Ma?” Shirley asked, joining Betty and Kitty at the dining table.
“Search me,” Betty said. “Am I my mother’s keeper?” Niven’s dog pricked up his ears, in vain. His thoughts were always on Niven.
Hanover Terrace had no Bradshaw’s timetable to keep them on track, there was no pull or push to their days, they simply drifted into them. Edith alone was propelled, although not today. They rose at their leisure in the late morning or early afternoon and ate a meal that meant something different for each of them. Shirley, for example, was contemplating the boiled eggs that had just been delivered by the cook, while Betty was tackling some kind of salad in aspic. (“Shrimp, I think, but it could be anything, really.”) Salads were not the cook’s speciality; this one looked as if it would have been more at home in an aquarium.
“I heard Ma go out earlier,” a jam-smeared Kitty said. She was sitting on the window seat entertaining herself by reading out loud from the gossip columns in the papers. She had recently been expelled from boarding school (arson, vehemently denied) and no one seemed to know what to do with her, so Nellie had tasked her with being the one who kept an eye on the papers for useful snippets of information—Lady Melchior has departed from Durban on the Windsor Castle and is homeward bound to Southampton, for example. Then a head waiter in one of the clubs could murmur, “Welcome home from South Africa, Lady Melchior, good to have you back,” as he presented her with a bottle of champagne that would appear to be free but would be cunningly rolled into the bill at the end of the night. Nothing was free in Nellie’s world, not even love. Perhaps especially not love.
The uncharacteristically tardy Edith, frowzy with sleep, joined the gathering flock and said, “I’m feeling peaky.”
“You do look green around the gills,” Betty said, summoning sympathy from somewhere. Sometimes she surprised herself. Betty was very hard-nosed yet occasionally mawkishly sentimental, a combination shared with her mother and many dictators both before and since.
Ramsay yawned his way to the table and mumbled something that could have been a greeting or an insult. They rarely resorted to good manners with each other.
An ashen Edith pinched out a piece of toast from the rack but then put it to one side as if it were crawling with spiders.
“Have some rum,” Shirley suggested. “That always does the trick for me.” Edith shuddered at the idea.