Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

was it. He took out his pocket watch. Three-thirty. Happily providence had brought him here early. Will Lamb would not be arriving at the Old King Cole in the care of Nettie Turner until this evening and whatever culinary fate might be in storefor the lucky diners tonight was presumably already stacked up, probably in some verminous outhouse. Meanwhile, garnish could do much to disguise even the worst of culinary disasters, he told himself.
    ‘Lizzie, kindly call a cab for us.’
    ‘You’re not leaving?’ wailed Jowitt.
    ‘And taking this young lady with me. Merely for an hour, Mr Jowitt. Should any bailiffs call, kindly lock them in the cellar.’
    Lizzie looked scared. ‘There ain’t no cabs round here.’
    ‘An omnibus then, Lizzie. Any mode of transport.’
    ‘Ma don’t like me going out with strange men.’
    ‘How old are you, Lizzie?’
    ‘Sixteen.’
    Auguste choked. He’d put her down as ten, and promptly abandoned his original instinct to remove her to the nearest tin bath, strip her and immerse her in a bath of disinfectant. He executed all his considerable charm. ‘Lizzie, please take me to the nearest outfitters.’
    ‘Commercial Road’s the best,’ Lizzie said doubtfully.
    Bond Street it was not, and there were none of the new horseless buses here, but they had emerged an hour later from an outfitters of sorts, a large parcel tucked firmly under Lizzie’s arm, from which she would not be parted.
    ‘For me?’ Lizzie asked in wonder for the twentieth time.
    ‘Only after a visit to the Public Baths,
ma fille?
    He handed Lizzie plus parcel, twopence, and a threepenny tip over to the attendant. Half an hour later a Lizzie of totally different hue shyly emerged. She was bright red from the scrubbing, and much of her hairhad vanished. What there was left made her look like a hopeful hedgehog.
    ‘My dad will take a strap to me, looking like a tart.’
    ‘The only tart you resemble, Lizzie, is a strawberry one.’
    She eyed him doubtfully. ‘I don’t look like a tart, then?’
    Auguste studied the most visible of the new clothes, the new brown print gown, fitting over the young breasts and modestly sinking beneath stocking-clad ankles. He compared her briefly with the ladies who strolled the Empire Promenade. ‘No,’ he said. Then, ominously, ‘What is that bundle under your arm, Lizzie?’
    ‘Me working clothes, of course,’ she said in surprise. ‘I can’t work togged up like this, can I?’
    None too gently he wrested the package from her, and threw it in a zinc bin destined for the adjoining wash-house.
    ‘What you doing?’ she howled in anguish.
    ‘Lizzie,’ he said, ‘cook for me, watch for me,
help
me, and you shall have enough to buy yourself twenty such dresses. Will you do that?’
    Lizzie considered, rather too long to please Auguste entirely. ‘Yus,’ she told him eventually.
    ‘Excellent,
ma petite.’
So pleased was he at this non-acrimonious agreement, so filled with dreams as to what he could teach this young disciple, and then so taken with the wares of the elderly woman at the kerbside selling hot pig’s trotters, that he failed to notice Lizzie had reclaimed her precious bundle, as she dutifully climbed up after him to the open-air deck of the bus.
    ‘You enjoy your work,
ma fille?’
    Enjoy? Lizzie looked at him blankly, and he tried another tack.
    ‘The Old King Cole is a happy place?’
    ‘Old Jowitt’s a rum cove.’
    ‘That I see, but the artistes? You like them?’ He perceived from the blank expression that he was getting nowhere. The Lizzies of this world had no time for reflecting on their lot. He changed tack. ‘Tell me about them, those that come to the eating-room.’
    ‘Mist’rill.’
    Auguste’s turn to look blank.
    ‘Max Hill,’ she repeated, ‘old cove. Does impersonations. Eats chops.’ She peeped at him to see if this was what he wanted and encouraged, swept on: ‘Mr Brodie, big he is. Jolly. Pats me bum, beefsteak man, hates Harry