The Fashion In Shrouds Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margery Allingham in the Albert Campion series

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Copyright

  About the Book

  First, there is a skeleton in a dinner jacket. Then a corpse in a golden aeroplane. After another body, Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth . . .

  Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia’s best friend just happens to be Valentine, a top couturière and Campion’s sister. In order to protect Valentine, Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder.

  About the Author

  Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She attended the Perse School in Cambridge before returning to London to the Regent Street Polytechnic. Her father – author H. J. Allingham – encouraged her to write, and was delighted when she contributed to her aunt’s cinematic magazine, The Picture Show, at the age of eight.

  Her first novel was published when she was seventeen. In 1928 she published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, which had been serialised in the Daily Express. The following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the character who was to become the hallmark of her writing – Albert Campion. Her novels heralded the more sophisticated suspense genre: characterised by her intuitive intelligence, extraordinary energy and accurate observation, they vary from the grave to the openly satirical, whilst never losing sight of the basic rules of the classic detective tale. Famous for her London thrillers, such as Hide My Eyes and The Tiger in the Smoke, she has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city’s shady underworld.

  In 1927 she married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter. They divided their time between their Bloomsbury flat and an old house in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. Margery Allingham died in 1966.

  ALSO BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM IN THE ALBERT CAMPION SERIES

  The Crime at Black Dudley

  Mystery Mile

  Look to the Lady

  Police at the Funeral

  Sweet Danger

  Death of a Ghost

  Dancers in Mourning

  Flowers for the Judge

  The Case of the Late Pig

  Mr Campion and Others

  Black Plumes

  Coroner’s Pidgin

  Traitor’s Purse

  The Casebook of Mr Campion

  More Work for the Undertaker

  The Tiger in the Smoke

  The Beckoning Lady

  Hide My Eyes

  The China Governess

  The Mind Readers

  A Cargo of Eagles

  The Fashion in Shrouds

  Margery Allingham

  ‘. . . there reigned throughout their whole world a special sort of snobbism and a conscious striving for effect which were the very parents of Fashion.’

  PAUL POIRET

  Chapter One

  PROBABLY THE MOST exasperating thing about the Fashion is its elusiveness. Even the word has a dozen definitions, and when it is pinned down and qualified, as ‘the Fashion in woman’s dress’, it becomes ridiculous and stilted and is gone again.

  To catch at its skirts it is safest to say that it is a kind of miracle, a familiar phenomenon. Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.

  When the last Roland Papendeik died, after receiving a knighthood for a royal wedding dress – having thus scaled the heights of his ambition as a great couturier – the ancient firm declined and might well have faded into one of the amusing legends Fashion leaves behind her had it not been for a certain phoenix quality possessed by Lady Papendeik.

  At the moment when descent became apparent and dissolution likely Lady Papendeik discovered Val, and from the day that the Valentine cape in Lincoln-green face-cloth flickered across the salon and won the hearts of twenty-five professional buyers and subsequently five hundred private purchasers Val climbed steadily, and behind her rose up the firm of Papendeik again like a great silk tent.

  At the moment she was standing in a fitting-room whither she had dragged a visitor who had come on private business of his own and was surveying herself in a wall-wide mirror with earnest criticism.

  Like most of those people whose personality has to be consciously expressed in the things they create, she was a little more of a person, a little more clear in outline than is usual. She had no suggestion of over-emphasis, but she was a sharp, vivid entity, and when one first saw her the immediate thing one realized was that it had not happened before.

  As she stood before the mirror considering her burgundy-red suit from every angle she looked about twenty-three, which was not the fact. Her slenderness was slenderness personified and her yellow hair, folding softly into the nape of her neck at the back and combed into a ridiculous roll in front, could have belonged to no one else and would have suited no other face.

  It occurred to her visitor, who was regarding her with the detached affection of a relation, that she was dressed up to look like a female, and he said so affably.

  She turned and grinned at him, her unexpectedly warm grey eyes, which saved her whole appearance from affectation, dancing at him happily.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I am, my darling. I’m female as a cartload of monkeys.’

  ‘Or a kettle of fish, of course,’ observed Mr Albert Campion, unfolding his long thin legs and rising from an inadequate gilt chair to look in the mirror also. ‘Do you like my new suit?’

  ‘Very good indeed.’ Her approval was professional. ‘Jamieson and Fellowes? I thought so. They’re so mercifully uninspired. Inspiration in men’s clothes is stomach-turning. People ought to be shot for it.’

  Campion raised his eyebrows at her. She had a charming voice which was high and clear and so unlike his own in tone and colour that it gave him a sense of acquisition whenever he heard it.

  ‘Too extreme,’ he said. ‘I like your garment, but let’s forget it now.’

  ‘Do you? I was wondering if it wasn’t a bit “intelligent”.’

  He looked interested.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you before these people come. Aren’t we lunching alone?’

  Val swung slowly round in only partially amused surprise. For a moment she looked her full age, which was thirty, and there was character and intelligence in her face.

  ‘You’re too clever altogether, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Go away. You take me out of my stride.’

  ‘Who is he? It’s not to be a lovely surprise, I trust?’ Campion put an arm round her shoulders and they stood for a moment admiring themselves with the bland
un-self-consciousness of the nursery. ‘If I didn’t look so half-witted we should be very much alike,’ he remarked presently. ‘There’s a distinct resemblance. Thank God we took after Mother and not the other side. Red hair would sink either of us, even father’s celebrated variety. Poor old Herbert used to look like nothing on earth.’

  He paused and considered her dispassionately in the mirror, while it occurred to him suddenly that the relationship between brother and sister was the one association of the sexes that was intrinsically personal.

  ‘If one resents one’s sister or even loathes the sight of her,’ he remarked presently, ‘it’s for familiar faults or virtues which one either has or hasn’t got oneself and one likes the little beast for the same rather personal reasons. I think you’re better than I am in one or two ways, but I’m always glad to note that you have sufficient feminine weaknesses to make you thoroughly inferior on the whole. This is a serious, valuable thought, by the way. See what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with an irritating lack of appreciation, ‘but I don’t think it’s very new. What feminine weaknesses have I got?’

  He beamed at her. In spite of her astonishing success she could always be relied upon to make him feel comfortingly superior.

  ‘Who’s coming to lunch?’

  ‘Alan Dell – Alandel aeroplanes.’

  ‘Really? That’s unexpected. I’ve heard of him, of course, but we’ve never met. Nice fellow?’

  She did not answer immediately and he glanced at her sharply.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last and met his eyes. ‘I think so, very.’

  Campion grimaced. ‘Valentine the valiant.’

  She was suddenly hurt and colour came into her face.

  ‘No, darling, not necessarily,’ she objected a little too vehemently. ‘Only twice shy, you know; only twice, not for ever.’

  There was dignity in the protest. It brought him down to earth and reminded him effectively that she was, after all, a distinguished and important woman with every right to her own private life. He changed the conversation, feeling, as he sometimes did, that she was older than he was, for all her femininity.

  ‘Can I smoke in this clothes-press without sacrilege?’ he inquired. ‘I came up here once to a reception when I was very young. The Perownes had it then as their town house. That was in the days before the street went down and a Perowne could live in Park Lane. I don’t remember much about it except that there were golden cream-horns bursting with fruit all around the cornice. You’ve transformed the place. Does Tante Marthe like the change of address?’

  ‘Lady Papendeik finds herself enchanted,’ said Val cheerfully, her mind still on her clothes. ‘She thinks it a pity trade should have come so near the Park, but she’s consoling herself by concentrating on “our mission to glorify the Essential Goddess.” This is a temple, my boy, not a shop. When it’s not a temple it’s that damned draughty hole of Maude Perowne’s. But on the whole it’s just exactly what she always wanted. It has the grand manner, the authentic Papa Papendeik touch. Did you see her little black pages downstairs?’

  ‘The objects in the turbans? Are they recent?’

  ‘Almost temporary,’ said Val, turning from the mirror and slipping her arm through his. ‘Let’s go up and wait. We’re lunching on the roof.’

  As he came through the wide doorway from a hushed and breathless world whose self-conscious good taste was almost overpowering to the upper, or workshop, part of the Papendeik establishment, Mr Campion felt a gratifying return to reality. A narrow uncarpeted corridor, still bearing traces of the Perowne era in wallpaper and paint, was lit by half a dozen open doorways through which came a variety of sounds, from the chiming of cups to the hiss of the pressing iron, while, above all, there predominated the strident, sibilant chatter of female voices, which is perhaps the most unpleasant noise in the world.

  An elderly woman in a shabby navy-blue dress came bustling along towards them, a black pincushion bumping ridiculously on her hip-bone as she walked. She did not stop but smiled and passed them, radiating a solid obstinacy as definite as the clatter of her old-lady shoes on the boards. Behind her trotted a man in a costume in which Campion recognized at once Val’s conception of the term ‘inspired’. He was breathless and angry and yet managed to look pathetic, with doggy brown eyes and the cares of the world on his compact little shoulders.

  ‘She won’t let me have it,’ he said without preamble. ‘I hate any sort of unpleasantness, but the two girls are waiting to go down to the house and I distinctly promised that the white model should go with the other. It’s the one with the draped corsage.’

  He sketched a design with his two hands on his own chest with surprising vividness.

  ‘The vendeuse is in tears.’

  He seemed not far off them himself and Mr Campion felt sorry for him.

  ‘Coax her,’ said Val without slackening pace, and they hurried on, leaving him sighing. ‘Rex,’ she said as they mounted the narrow uncarpeted staircase amid a labyrinth of corridors, ‘Tante says he’s not quite a lady. It’s one of her filthy remarks that gets more true the longer you know him.’

  Campion made no comment. They were passing through a group of untidy girls who had stepped aside as they appeared.

  ‘Seamstresses,’ Val explained as they came up on to the landing. ‘Tante prefers the word to “work-women”. This is their room.’

  She threw open a door which faced them and he looked into a vast attic where solid felt-covered tables made a mighty horseshoe whose well was peopled with dreadful brown headless figures each fretted with pinpricks and labelled with the name of the lady whose secret faults of contour it so uncompromisingly reproduced.

  Reflecting that easily the most terrifying thing about women was their practical realism, he withdrew uneasily and followed her up a final staircase to a small roof-garden set among the chimney-pots, where a table had been laid beneath a striped awning.

  It was early summer and the trees in the Park were round and green above the formal flower-beds, so that the view, as they looked down upon it, was like a coloured panoramic print of eighteenth-century London, with the houses of the Bayswater Road making a grey cloud on the horizon.

  He sat down on a white basket-work settee and blinked at her in the sunlight.

  ‘I want to meet Georgia Wells. You’re sure she’s coming?’

  ‘My dear, they’re all coming.’ Val spoke soothingly. ‘Her husband, the leading man, Ferdie Paul himself and Heaven knows who else. It’s partly mutual publicity and partly a genuine inspection of dresses for The Lover, now in rehearsal. You’ll see Georgia all right.’

  ‘Good,’ he said and his lean face was unusually thoughtful. ‘I shall try not to be vulgar or indiscreet, of course, but I must get to know her if I can. Was she actually engaged to Portland-Smith at the time he disappeared, or was it already off by then?’

  Val considered and her eyes strayed to the doorway through which they had come.

  ‘It’s almost three years ago, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘My impression is that it was still on, but I can’t swear to it. It was all kept so decently quiet until the family decided that they really had better look for him, and by then she was stalking Ramillies. It’s funny you never found that man, Albert. He’s your one entire failure, isn’t he?’

  Apparently Mr Campion did not care to comment.

  ‘How long has she been Lady Ramillies?’

  ‘Over two years, I think.’

  ‘Shall I get a black eye if I lead round to Portland-Smith?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Georgia’s not renowned for good taste. If she stares at you blankly it’ll only mean that she’s forgotten the poor beast’s name.’

  He laughed. ‘You don’t like the woman?’

  Val hesitated. She looked very feminine.

  ‘Georgia’s our most important client, “the best-dressed actress in the world gowned by the most famous couturier”. We’re a mutual benefit society.’
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  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She glanced at the door again and then out over the Park. ‘I admire her. She’s witty, beautiful, predatory, intrinsically vulgar and utterly charming.’

  Mr Campion became diffident.

  ‘You’re not jealous of her?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. I’m as successful as she is – more.’

  ‘Frightened of her?’

  Val looked at him and he was embarrassed to see in her for an instant the candid-eyed child of his youth.

  ‘Thoroughly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s so charming,’ she said with uncharacteristic naïveté. ‘She’s got my charm.’

  ‘That’s unforgivable,’ he agreed sympathetically. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The only one there is, my good ape. She makes you think she likes you. Forget her. You’ll see her this afternoon. I like her really. She’s fundamentally sadistic and not nearly so brilliant as she sounds, but she’s all right. I like her. I do like her.’

  Mr Campion thought it wisest not to press the subject and would doubtless have started some other topic had he not discovered that Val was no longer listening to him. The door to the staircase had opened and her second guest had arrived.

  As he rose to greet the newcomer Campion was aware of a fleeting sense of disappointment.

  In common with many other people he cherished the secret conviction that a celebrity should look peculiar, at the very least, and had hitherto been happy to note that a great number did.

  Dell was an exception. He was a bony thirty-five-year-old with greying hair and the recently scoured appearance of one intimately associated with machinery. It was only when he spoke, revealing a cultured mobile voice of unexpected authority, that his personality became apparent. He came forward shyly and it occurred to Campion that he was a little put out to find that he was not the only guest.

  ‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘I had no idea Albert Campion was your brother.’

  ‘Oh, we’re a distinguished family,’ murmured Val brightly, but an underlying note of uncertainty in her voice made Campion glance at her shrewdly. He was a little startled by the change in her. She looked younger and less elegant, more charming and far more vulnerable. He looked at the man and was relieved to see that he was very much aware of her.