22 May 1959
On Friday afternoon Lucien once more set off for the Lock and Key, the results from Sarah's tests tucked into his medical bag and a lightness to his steps. All week he had been looking forward to this, to having an excuse to return to the pub, to see Mrs. Beazley and her girls again, to learn a bit more about her in hopes of unraveling the mystery that had been presented to him.
There were so many questions swirling through his mind he could hardly decide where to begin. First among them was the matter of the dead girl who'd been fished out of the creek; her name was Lucille, and she'd last been seen in the company of Edward Tyneman, which Lucien liked not one bit. Matthew was insisting that Lucien's role in that investigation was done, that the police surgeon need not be involved any longer, but Lucien wasn't so sure. The Lock and Key seemed like just the sort of place a Tyneman might patronize, given their wealth and general disregard for other people, and perhaps the younger Tyneman worried less about reputation and appearance than his father did. Surely, Lucien thought, one or another of those girls must have crossed paths with him before.
After that, though, the remaining questions that plagued him were much more personal. How had Jean come to be wed, and how had Matthew come to know her husband, and what had become of the man? Where were her children now, why did she stay on in this business when surely she must have had other opportunities? How did she feel about the work? And had she ever been one of them, those bright and cheerful girls in their beautiful dresses who sold themselves every evening? At first he'd thought that she must have been, that she had once been a girl and had moved up through the ranks, as it were, until she found a comfortable position where she did not have to perform such work herself. Now he was not so sure; perhaps she was, and always had been, no more than a madam, a landlady. Perhaps she had been a perfectly respectable sort of woman, and inherited the pub when her husband died. He liked that idea, the idea that she looked after those girls but was not truly one of them; he liked it, but he did not want to think too long or too hard about why it mattered to him whether Mrs. Beazley herself had ever been for sale, or ever would be again. The answer to that question lurked somewhere in his own subconscious, in a place he did not dare tread, not yet, not now under the cheerful sun of an autumn afternoon.
Once more he parked several streets away, once more he walked along the pavement with a smile on his face, once more he ignored the CLOSED sign and walked straight into the pub accompanied by the tinkling sound of the bell above the door. The dining room of the pub was deserted; it was too late for lunch and too early for supper, and none of the girls were about. Perhaps I should have rung her first, Lucien thought as he gazed around the empty dining room, wondering if perhaps Mrs. Beazley was out, but of course he did not have the number for the pub, had not thought to ask, and whether it was right or wrong to drop by unannounced he did not have the means to correct his error. So what then should he do? Go right upstairs, uninvited, and try to locate Sarah's room from memory, and speak to her without Jean present? That didn't seem right somehow, but he did not want to leave Sarah for another day; she needed to hear what he had to say.
For a moment or two he agonized over what to do, but then he heard the sound of calling voices coming from behind the bar. There was a door back there, currently propped open, that must have led back to a kitchen, and it was through that door that those voices reached him, Mrs. Beazley's recognizable to him already. She was laughing, and quite before Lucien realized it he found himself following that sparkling little laugh, ducking behind the bar and then stepping straight through that door.
The door did, in fact, lead to the kitchen; there were sinks and stoves and ovens and a walk-in freezer back here, wooden crates of potatoes and carefully labeled bins of sugar and flour and salt, gleaming pots and pans hanging from hooks along the walls, everything in its proper place. The voices were not coming from the kitchen, exactly, but from just beyond it; on the far wall there were two double doors that opened up into the carpark, and it was there that he found Mrs. Beazley, helping a man with a heavy Greek accent to unload boxes of food and alcohol from his truck and stow them inside the pub.
For a moment Lucien simply watched her, for she was so lovely he could hardly find the strength to tear his eyes away. On this fine afternoon Mrs. Beazley wore a starched white shirt embroidered with a pattern of pale blue flowers, tucked smartly into a pair of very well-fitted blue trousers. The sleeves of her shirt had been rolled up to her elbows to allow her freedom to work, and when she moved Lucien saw the flash of her ankle between her sensible suede pumps and the hem of those damanable trousers. Deftly Jean bent, her every move as graceful and enchanting as a ballet, caught hold of a box emblazoned with the logo of a popular bottled beer, and swung upright with the box in her arms, balanced on her hip, with all the practiced skill of a mother long accustomed to holding a child there. The shirt she wore fit her as well as those trousers did, and as she moved Lucien could see the movement of her muscles beneath it, silent evidence of a strength that seemed surprising given her delicate frame.
"Oh!" Jean called when she caught sight of him. "Doctor Blake. I didn't expect to see you there."
While she had been speaking Lucien rushed over to her, and he had only just reached her as he answered.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Beazley. May I help you with this?" he reached to take the box from her; if it was full of bottles it must have been quite heavy indeed, and though he had no doubt that Mrs. Beazley could handle it quite well all on her own some deeper, more chivalrous instinct compelled him to step in and offer his assistance.
The color was high in her cheeks, and a lock of her dark hair had escaped the confines of her coiffure to tumble enticingly across her pale forehead. In response to his offer she grinned, a bit wryly, but only tightened her grip upon the box she held.
"I can manage this perfectly well," she told him smoothly. "But if you want to make yourself useful, you could go and help Dimitri with the kegs? Many hands make light work."
Lucien grinned. "They do indeed."
Jean wasn't quite sure what to make of Doctor Blake's offer; did he really think she couldn't handle the weekly delivery on her own? Never once in the last ten years had Jean needed any assistance in taking care of her own business, and the idea that Doctor Blake might think her too weak to carry out her usual tasks was an affront to her sensibilities. And yet she did not think that was the case, not entirely; he had jumped at the chance to help Sarah without promise of payment or reward, only out of the goodness of his own heart, and she rather thought he was doing much the same now, offering to help because it was the right thing to do. As Jean dropped the box in its usual place against the wall she turned, and found that Doctor Blake had already removed his hat and shrugged out of his jacket, and was even now rolling back the sleeves of his shirt in preparation for the work ahead.
And for a moment, just one instant, Jean found herself frozen, watching him. She had known, of course, that he was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, but she had not realized quite how much, not until now when she could see the bunching and flexing of his muscles beneath his crisp white shirt. Utterly oblivious to her attentions Doctor Blake turned and marched smartly out into the carpark, and the view of his retreating form revealed one rather well-made bum previously hidden beneath his dark jacket, and Jean's cheeks flushed pink at the very thought. Handsome, and strong, and kind, always willing to lend a hand; Jean was beginning to suspect that Doctor Blake would bring trouble, as his father had always said he would, though not at all in the way she had expected.
When Jean stepped out into the carpark she found Dimitri and the good doctor laughing together, speaking in a broken mix of Greek and English that seemed to suit them both. Of course Doctor Blake spoke a little Greek, she thought; he was well-traveled and wealthy, and would have had the means to dabble in all sorts of learning. She wanted to dislike him for it, but his smile was so very gentle, his eyes so very warm, and he had without hesitation jumped into the back of Dimitri's truck, beginning to roll the first of the week's kegs down the little ramp Dimitri had propped against the truck, his muscles rippling while he worked. In Jean's experience men like the Doctor always had other people to do the heavy lifting for them - Thomas Blake had certainly never lifted a finger in manual labor in his life - but Lucien was smiling, and did not seem at all disgruntled about having been pressed into this service. And so Jean smiled, and scooped up the nearest case of whiskey, propping it on her hip and carrying it into the kitchen with her thoughts racing.
The addition of Doctor Blake's strong arms did indeed help the time to pass more quickly; he and Dimitri seemed to get on quite well together, and laughed as they rolled the kegs into the pub, though Jean could only seem to catch about every third word of their conversation, and so had no idea what made them both so merry. The produce had already been unloaded and neatly stowed away, and so it took no more than a quarter of an hour for them to complete their work. When it was finished Doctor Blake's face was flushed above his neat beard but he was smiling widely, and he shook Dimitri's hand in an easy, gregarious sort of manner not common among men of his social standing.
"You keep him here, Jeannie," Dimitri told her, clapping the Doctor on the back. "I like this one. He is good man, yes? Good friend."
"Yes," Jean answered, noting the way Doctor Blake seemed to beam at the praise. "He's handy to have around. I'll see you next week, Dimitri."
"Ta Leme, Jeannie," he said, and then with a jovial wave he was off, closing the back of his truck and whistling to himself as he went.
And so Jean found herself once again alone with Doctor Blake, and for some reason the sight of him without his jacket, his sleeves rolled up to reveal the thick length of his forearms, made her just a little nervous. Their acquaintance was so very new she did not know yet what sort of relationship they might establish for themselves, and that troubled her. It had been easy, with old Doctor Blake; he was the Doctor, would come to offer his expertise and very little else. There had been a few occasions when a birth or illness kept him longer at the pub than he might otherwise have stayed, and Jean had offered him a cup of tea and they had spoken quietly together, but there had never been any doubt, even in those somewhat more relaxed moments, that they inhabited very different worlds, and the lines between them had never blurred into true friendship. Lucien, on the other hand….well. She did not know yet what it was he would become to her, but his willingness to step in today seemed to indicate a sort of egalitarian gregariousness that she did not have the first idea how to manage.
"Well," she said, turning to face him then. "I think you've earned a cup of tea, Doctor Blake. Unless there's somewhere else you need to be."
"A cup of tea would be lovely, thank you, Mrs. Beazley. I really ought to put myself together before I go see to Sarah."
Of course, he had not stopped by only to help her; somehow Jean had forgotten during the course of their work that he must have had some other purpose. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to send him straight upstairs to tend to his patient rather than waylaying him with the promise of tea, but now that the offer had been made she could see no graceful way to rescind it, and did not really want to, in any case. And so they trooped back into the kitchen, Jean pausing to lock the exterior doors while the Doctor retrieved his jacket.
While he slung his jacket over his arm and plucked up his hat from the worktop where he'd left it Jean bustled about with all the calm efficiency of a publican. He followed behind her, to a corner of the kitchen where a pair of stools flanked the edge of a stovetop on which there sat an ancient, old fashioned copper kettle. Jean fired up the stove with one hand and reached above it with the other, pulling down two china cups painted with an intricate design of flowers. With the kettle heating up and the teacups retrieved she reached next for a box of loose tea, and a porcelain bowl of sugar, painted to match the cups. There was something wonderfully domestic about it all, Lucien thought, the old kettle and those cups seeming more like the sort of thing one might find in a woman's home kitchen, rather than tucked away in the back corner of a brothel.
"We can have a seat while we wait," Jean said, gesturing towards the stools, and so they did, together, plopping themselves down so that they sat one on either side of the corner of the stove.
Lucien smiled at her, but no words came to him. He had thanked her for the tea once already, and to do so again would sound somewhat inane, he thought. He wanted, very much, to ask about her husband, but it was not the sort of question he could broach without any warning; he must lead up to it carefully. That he was approaching his conversation with Jean in much the same way he might approach a suspect involved in a murder did not escape his notice, and he fretted over that, just a bit. She was not a witness, and this was not an interview, but still, there were so many questions he wanted to ask he hardly knew where to begin. Jean saved him from himself, however; perhaps the many years she'd spent in this line of work had taught her how to manage all sorts of conversations, under all sorts of circumstances.
"Did the police ever find out what happened to that poor girl?" she asked. Though sitting on a stool and maintaining one's dignity was not an easy feat she managed it, somehow; she sat with her back ramrod straight, her legs daintily crossed at the ankle, her hands folded together neatly in her lap. For his part Lucien felt much too big for his seat, his feet planted firmly on the floor and his elbows resting on his knees as he leaned towards her.
"No, actually," Lucien answered, grateful for the opening she'd given him. "Her description matches the girl we discussed. That girl's name was Lucille, and according to a few of your young ladies she was desperate for a way to earn some income. The police have spoken to a few other people, and they reckon they remember seeing Edward Tyneman with a girl of her description. Of course, this was all months ago, and no one can be entirely certain."
"Edward Tyneman," Jean said, frowning. "That's a worry."
"What do you know about him, Mrs. Beazley? I'm afraid I'm only acquainted with his father." And I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, but he doesn't seem the sort to get involved with a desperate girl like this.
"Patrick is a businessman. He knows how to protect his interests, and he takes care of his reputation. The family has always been wealthy, but Patrick has worked to grow that wealth. Edward hasn't ever worked at anything, as far as I can tell."
The words were spoken with a certain air of distaste, and it was plain that Mrs. Beazley was not fond of the younger Tyneman in the least. There's not a thing that happens in this town she doesn't know about, Matthew had told him once, and Lucien felt a sudden hope rise up in his chest. The police's inquiries had stalled, but Lucien felt as if he were on the verge of a breakthrough, sitting here with her.
"Has he ever been a customer here?" he asked eagerly, hoping she would say yes, that she would tell him Edward Tyneman was exactly the sort of man to take advantage of a young girl.
"Once," Jean said darkly. "And after that, I told him to never show his face here again. He's...boorish, and prone to anger. I don't need his kind of trouble here."
That was an alarming thought. From what little he'd learned about her Lucien could see that Jean took the safety of her girls quite seriously, and though she did not offer any explanation as to what Edward might have done that got him banned from the Lock and Key her expression spoke volumes.
"So if he's looking for a girl, he'd have to find her on his own," Lucien mused.
"You might go and have a look at Ealing Estate," Jean told him. "It's an old property that's been in the Tyneman family for years. No one lives there now, but...I've heard things. I believe Edward uses it when he wants to...entertain himself. And you might talk to Adam, the projectionist at the Rex, he's a good friend of Edward's. If Edward got into any sort of trouble, Adam would know about it."
"I will do that, Mrs. Beazley, thank you."
The kettle had begun to whistle, then, and so Jean rose deftly to her feet, carefully pouring the boiling water over the tea leaves she'd arranged in strainers above each cup. She'd given him a great deal to think about; an old, unoccupied family estate, a troublesome, perhaps violent young man with more money than sense, a projectionist...Lucien wasn't sure how a man like Edward Tyneman might entertain himself, but he was sure that whatever he got up to couldn't be innocent fun. Especially not given the way Mrs. Beazely had spoken of him. The police might be too afraid of Patrick to investigate his boy in any serious way, but Lucien felt no such restraints. If they wouldn't ask the questions, he'd be happy to do so himself.
"We'll just let that steep for a moment," Jean said, settling down on her stool while the tea steamed merrily in its little cups.
"Do you often get troublesome gentlemen in here, Mrs. Beazley?"
The question slipped past his lips before Lucien could stop it. The thought of Edward Tyneman, and what he might have done to make Jean dislike him so, had led Lucien's mind to other, darker places. Over the course of his life he'd heard all manner of stories, about the violence inflicted upon prostitutes by their customers, the dangers they faced, and while the Lock and Key was cheery and bright the specter of Edward Tyneman had given Lucien cause to wonder whether Jean and her girls were safe from such treatment, or if violence visited them here just as it visited their sisters in less comfortable places.
"Not usually, no," Jean told him evenly. "I always have security on the door, and our rates keep the more troublesome sort out. The kind of men who can spend ten pounds for an hour with one of my girls aren't usually the kind of men looking to cause trouble."
"Ten pounds?" Lucien repeated, faintly shocked. He had wondered, before now, what Mrs. Beazley's girls charged for their services, and he had known it was rather a lot, but he had not realized it was a week's wages. He could see the wisdom of it, the way it protected her, for most men could not afford to spend so very much in one evening, and certainly could not have hoped to hide such an expense from their wives.
"We run a sterling service here, Doctor Blake," Jean told him primly. "It's clean, and it's quiet, and it's discrete. If a customer doesn't want to pay our price then he's welcome to look elsewhere."
"They all charge the same, then?"
Jean leaned over to check the teacups and, apparently satisfied with their progress, she carefully removed the strainers before handing one cup to Lucien and taking the other for herself.
"Each girl can set her own rate," Jean told him. "Some may go as low as seven, and others may go as high as fifteen. Every girl has something different to offer, and they know their own worth."
"And what about you, Mrs. Beazley?"
Something flashed in her eyes, dangerous and warning, and it was only then that Lucien realized he had just tread on thin ice. Their conversation so far had been pleasant, and it had not escaped his notice that she had not charged him for it. Perhaps she'd thought his assistance with the delivery was sufficient payment for the information she gave him, but his questions had wandered away from the investigation and onto far more personal matters. From the moment he met her Lucien had been eaten alive with curiosity, wondering how she'd gotten into this business, and how involved in it she was, and his eagerness had betrayed him now. Jean had struck him from the very first as a private, proper sort of woman, and his question was most improper, and so he waited with bated breath, wondering if she was about to throw him out for his gross breach of the rules of etiquette she had set down between them.
"I don't do that any more, Doctor Blake," she told him primly. "I'm management now. Besides, you couldn't afford me. Drink your tea."
