Tilly had mentioned the Dame’s ‘flat’ but Joe noticed there was only one doorbell. The door opened smoothly, answering to the larger of the two keys, and he walked into a wide, uncluttered hallway. He paused uncertainly, his cover story ready against a challenging occupant. No one hurried forward indignantly to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing there. Again, there were no signs of multiple occupancy. No doorways were boarded up, there were no handwritten signs with arrows pointing to the upper floors, no table spilling over with post to be collected by other inhabitants. Joe concluded that the Dame must own the whole of the house. He stood and listened. The house had the dead sound of a completely empty space.
Boldly, he called out, ‘Beatrice! Are you there?’
Receiving no response, he opened the door to the drawing room.
What had he expected? Emerald green walls, disordered divans piled high with purple cushions, post-Impressionist daubs, an attempt to recreate the Bakst decor for Scheherazade? Yes, he silently admitted that he had expected something of the sort. He had thought that the Dame, having chosen to live in Bloomsbury, would be playing up to the artistic, insouciant style its inhabitants were renowned for. The room surprised him. Modern but restrained, it was obviously decorated by an amateur with a strong personal style.
The walls were a pale string-colour, the wood floor covered in Persian rugs in browns and amber, the large sofa was of black leather. He ran his hands covetously over a piece that might once have been called a chaise longue but this was a sleek, steel-framed extended chair of German design. There was a good supply of small tables, set beside matching chairs of a blond wood inlaid with a pleasing pattern. Joe was interested enough to turn one over to see the manufacturer’s name. Austrian, but available from Heal’s in the nearby Tottenham Court Road. Over the fireplace hung a large and lovely seascape, the other walls carried pictures in a medley of styles: a French landscape, a study of horses that might – but surely couldn’t? – have been by Stubbs, two golden watercolours of an Eastern scene by Chinery and a small Augustus John portrait. They had nothing in common except the owner’s taste, he decided, and again wished that he had met Beatrice in the living flesh. Unusually, there were no family portraits or photographs, nothing of a personal nature.
He counted the seating places and reckoned that the Dame could entertain eight or ten people if she wished. And entertain in some style. She could have invited the First Sea Lord, his lady wife and his lady wife’s maiden aunt for cocktails and they would have been charmed. All was correct and elegant, apart from one object he’d spotted on the mantelpiece – a modern bronze of Europa riding half naked and garlanded on the back of her bull. But it was a work of art and only erotic if you had eyes to see, he thought, and were nosy enough to pick it up and view it from an unusual angle. He paused to handle respectfully a chrome and white table lighter and its matching cigarette box. Removing the lid he sniffed the contents. Turkish at one end and Virginian at the other. Nothing more sinister was going to be on offer in this proper setting.
Shrugging off his fascination for the decorative contents of the room, Joe left to survey the rest of the house. He would return to carry out the correct procedure for checking the contents minutely when he’d got his bearings. The rest of the ground floor was less interesting. The dining room was furnished but looked as though it had never been used, the kitchen and pantry were soulless and bare of contents. A refrigerator, he noticed, held bottles of champagne and hock but that was all. Upstairs was a bathroom, simply appointed but with the luxury of a shower, and two furnished bedrooms. The larger of the two, at the front of the house overlooking the public garden, was level with the tops of the plane trees and decorated in green and white. Obviously the Dame’s bedroom: the wardrobes were full of her clothes, the dressing table held cosmetic items and a flacon of her perfume which seemed to be Tabac Blond. He admired the square bottle with its pale gold disc and exuberant gold fringe tied carelessly around the neck and lifted the glass stopper. A dark, challenging scent of forest, fern and leather intrigued him. The woman who would wear this he could imagine taking the wheel of an open-topped sports car, perhaps pausing to pull on, but not fasten, a leather flying helmet before she put her foot to the floor. For a moment he pictured himself in the passenger seat with the Petit Littoral zipping past in the background. He put the genie of imagination back in the bottle with the stopper and made for what he took to be the guest bedroom at the rear of the house.
At last he had found a jarring note. The disordered divan – it was here! Large, low, plump and covered in a silk of a rich exotic colour which he thought might be mulberry, it was all he understood to be bohemian. Cushions, tasselled, striped, silken, spilled over on to the floor. There was no other furniture apart from a black and gold lacquer screen which cut off one corner of the room. Joe automatically checked behind it, finding nothing but an embroidered Chinese robe and a discarded silk stocking. On the wall behind the bed was a striking painting. He recognized the style. Modigliani. A stick-like girl who ought to have been deeply unattractive managed somehow with swooning eyes and horizontal abandoned pose to convey a feeling of eroticism. He found the decor stagey, the theatricality underlined by two oversized fan-shaped wall lights. The atmosphere was oppressive, the room airless and scented with something which, worryingly, he could not identify.