“Did you lose anyone in the war?” he found himself blurting out. This was what happened, he realized with regret, when you were badly schooled in the art of small talk.
She gave him a long, alarmingly direct look and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said very matter-of-factly, “I lost everyone, Inspector.” She returned her attention to the bun. When she had finished, she brushed the crumbs off her hands and said, “You haven’t asked me about my new accommodation.”
A safer topic for conversation than the war, he thought （or was it?）， and obediently said, “How is your new accommodation?”
“Pink!” she declared, laughing. “Everything is pink, even the carpet.”
“A pink carpet?”
“I know. Fitted as well, such a novelty. Nellie designed the décor, she’s very proud of it. I doubt it would be to your taste.”
“You presume to know my taste,” Frobisher said.
“I think I do,” she said merrily. “And I very much doubt that it runs to pink.”
* * *
—
Gwendolen had said that she would work for Nellie Coker for just a week, but the week was already up and Frobisher was disturbed that she was showing no signs of returning home. But she had not fulfilled her quest, she protested. “Freda and Florence,” she added, as if he needed reminding.
“I have not forgotten them,” he said stiffly, offended that she would think he had. She had persuaded him to investigate further a place in Henrietta Street, where she claimed Freda and Florence had been living before they disappeared. （She had been very pleased with her detective work. Overly pleased, in Frobisher’s opinion.） He had duly asked Cobb to go to the boarding house and enquire about the girls.
Cobb reported a dead end. He had “looked around a bit” but found nothing untoward at the Henrietta Street premises, and the landlady—a Mrs. Darling—had vehemently denied ever having had the girls beneath her roof.
“You haven’t returned there, have you?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
“Because you can’t go around interrogating innocent people.”
“I don’t know about ‘innocent’ and there is something wrong with that place,” Gwendolen insisted, replacing her teacup on its saucer with rather more force than necessary. “You should go there yourself,” she urged him. “You’re bound to have a better nose for wrongdoing.”
“Are you trying to flatter me into action, Miss Kelling?”
“No! I never flatter if I can help it,” she said with a laugh, and, after a pause, “You know, I wish you would call me Gwendolen.”
“And you would call me John then?”
“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “It doesn’t suit. I think I shall call you Frobisher. I do anyway, in my head.”
“Do you?” She thought about him when he wasn’t present? In her head? It was a stirring idea.
“Although…”
“Although?”
“I rather like Inspector. Shall we have more tea, and shall I tell you what I have gleaned about Nellie’s clubs?”
She had received a guided tour through the Cokers’ underworld from Ramsay Coker, the younger son, she said. Virgil to my Dante. The Crystal, she said （again that irritating familiarity, he noted）， seemed to be far and away the classiest of all of Nellie’s clubs. Ticking them off on her fingers, she said she had encountered at least two judges, two Cabinet ministers, three members of Parliament, four members of the peerage and an Anglican archdeacon—all in one week!
“All men?” Frobisher asked.
“No, of course not, many of them were in the company of their wives.”
“But many weren’t?”
“No different from any other London club, then,” she said. She was defensive, Frobisher thought. Or adversarial, he wasn’t sure which.
“I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that I am not the clubbable sort,” he said.
“Indeed it does not, Inspector.”
As to the other clubs—the Sphinx, she told Frobisher, was “strange,” the Pixie was “rather nice—very good sandwiches” and the Foxhole “energetic.” Ramsay, the second son, was “a dreamer, young for his age.” She had met Betty and Shirley only briefly （they seemed to come as a pair） and had as yet been unable to form an opinion about them. The other sister, Edith, had been “at death’s door,” according to Nellie, and was still confined to her sickbed. The youngest of all, Kitty, suffered abysmally from neglect.