At the door, Billy looked back. Mr Simenon’s words couldn’t sting him. He’d heard worse. He’d given out worse, too, because you weren’t an Irish lad in London if you hadn’t got into some scrap or another. No, what stung him most of all was that Lord Edgerton and his guests were bowed down again, thick in their conversation – and he’d barely heard a single word. There would be no tip from Mr Charles tonight.

*

On the sixth storey, Billy took out a single silver key and slipped through the doors of Vivienne Edgerton’s suite. First time he’d come here, it had been a strange delight to walk among her things, to know he could snoop inside her clutch bag, her wardrobe, the Moroccan manuscript book she kept on the dresser and in which (or so Billy imagined, for in the end he’d been too much of a gentleman to look) she wrote down her darkest secrets. Now, as he looked around, he had another feeling. Was it really sadness? Guilt? The suite had not been cleaned today. Sometimes Vivienne slept so late and dismissed so many chambermaids that it could go days without being swept or the bedsheets being changed. Billy stepped across an open suitcase, through the dresses she’d strewn around, past the unmade bed and to the little chest of drawers. A gramo-phone record was lying on her pillow but the gramophone itself was nowhere to be seen. On the record’s sleeve was a picture of the Dorsey Brothers’ Orchestra. It was a copy of ‘Tailspin’, and scratched so deeply that Vivienne either cared nothing for it, or cared too much.

On the dresser, a bottle of the finest Tabu was knocked over. The perfume had left a stain on the varnish, cutting rivulets down the front of the dresser and to the sheepskin below. Billy followed it with his eyes. He stopped, momentarily, when he saw what he took for a pair of gentleman’s drawers lying under the bed – but even this did not make him linger long.

He reached into his back pocket. The little drawstring bag sat in the palm of his hand. He hesitated. Something was making him resist laying the package down on the pillow where it ought to have gone – where it had gone so many times before. He pictured her up here, playing her records, dancing alone, and a part of him wanted to take the drawstring bag and cast it out of the balcony window, or flush it clean away.

Then he remembered Nancy Nettleton. Sweet Nancy Nettleton and her stubborn leg, hurrying away from the ballroom with Vivienne’s shrill laughter ringing in his ears.

Billy Brogan laid the package down on Vivienne’s pillow and slid quietly out of the room.

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen