The Stylist

Book 747: Murder Room

by Guy Cullingford

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Laura Chance, wife of Borford's prospective Lord Mayor, becomes infatuated with her young hairdresser, Pierre, who resembles her dead son. Pierre is utterly selfish, unscrupulous and sees in the wealthy, middle-aged woman a dupe who can give him some of the material possessions he covets. Despite her innate intelligence, Laura deceives herself that their relationship has a basis of real affection. But the trouble really starts when James Chance discovers what is happening and determines to ruin Pierre by using his influence in the city. Pierre, in his turn, plans a violent revenge . . .

Release date: November 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

When did it start? At what exact moment did the face in the mirror cease to be the commonplace, ageing Mrs. Chance and become Pierre’s predestined prey? Once a week, for
nearly six months, he had seen first one plump hand, then the other, richly engemmed, displayed on a cushion for his and the manicurist’s benefit. The nails were filbert and she kept
faithfully to an opalescent gleam which played pearl to her diamonds. As he deftly but mechanically slipped in the pin curls from temple to ear lobe, he must often have been aware of those big
stones marching abreast in their old-fashioned hoops, without giving them any real thought. After all, he was used to the costly adornments of wealthy women. But was there, perhaps, a special
occasion when some small movement set every facet winking out to him a strictly personal message?

Then was this the day when Mrs. Chance first noticed a vague feeling of pleasure as he flipped through her harsh, iron-grey curls to see if they were thoroughly dry before taking a brush to
them? When she immediately took a sharp glance at her own reflection to make sure that she was who she thought she was, and not an entirely different person? This sort of nonsense was a thing of
the past, and she had never set much store by it. She had long since given up sleeping with her husband, or any other man and if she had considered it, which she hadn’t, she would have
guaranteed herself beyond the reach of any sensual feeling even of the most innocent description. The eyes that looked back at her from their crowsfoot setting might not be as bright as her own
diamonds but they still saw clearly without the aid of spectacles, rose-tinted or otherwise. She was fifty. She had always been plain and if she continued to spend money on her appearance and to
make up carefully it was more because such conduct was expected of her than for reasons of vanity. She knew that behind the kindly cover cream there was no longer any complexion to preserve; the
nightly application of what was, slightly comically in her opinion, described as skin-food, was a ritual rather than an act of faith. Like many another woman of her age, she put a good face on her
years, but expected it to deceive no one, least of all herself. The wrinkles were still there and so was the droop at the corners of the mouth reaching down towards the neck muscles. The lips under
the softened, ochreous pink would be colourless without it. The teeth were filled and layered and no longer white, she hoped that they would last her out. Hairs grew more easily under her chin than
upon her scalp. Yet in spite of all this, and her intelligent acceptance of it, she could not honestly deny that she had felt for a brief moment a revival of sensations she had thought gone for
ever. Once she had reassured herself as to her true identity, she took a fresh look at the young man who had put the clock back for her. He seemed quite genuinely absorbed in his occupation and
unconscious of her attention. She supposed that he was attractive in an obvious kind of way, his dark hair, very vital and healthy, fell forward over a low brow as he bent over his work. He was
clean-shaven and inclined to be sallow but he had a straight nose and a well-shaped mouth. What a pity that the chin should dwindle away thereafter! Such chins do not necessarily denote weakness
but they spoil the profile. That there was nothing really arresting about these features or their arrangement went without saying. It wouldn’t have taken Mrs. Chance six months to wake up to
it. The lashes on the half-lowered lids might be long and dark but the eyes themselves were too sharp for beauty and set too close in for harmony.

Of course, the magic was in his hands, she decided wryly. In the finger-tips which coaxed the hair the way he wanted it as well as stimulating some nerve-ends better left undisturbed. Otherwise
the clash of appointments which had sent her, justifiably annoyed, to his ministrations when she had booked with Rudi, wouldn’t have developed into a permanent arrangement. Rudi was piqued,
but he could scarcely complain about a situation which had arisen from his own fault. He had allowed himself to become over-booked as usual. Pierre had made good use of his opportunity – Mrs.
Chance was known to be a handsome tipper – and Mrs. Chance was pleased with the results. As she was strong-minded and stood in no awe of Rudi as did all of his underlings and most of his
clients, she took the course that suited her best and made the transition without apology. But certainly not because she was drawn to Pierre as a male. To her he was just the young man who did her
hair. Until now, perhaps.

“How’s that?” he asked her, having finished. He stood back a little to regard his own handiwork, as an artist from the canvas.

Banal words! Mrs. Chance returned him a conventional smile.

“Very nice, thank you!” she replied, casting a perfunctory glance at the nape of her neck, still rosy from the dryer, in the hand-mirror presented. Her rounded forehead also had a
burnished appearance but above this, Pierre had swept the hair first back and then forward in an easy roll. A little judicious back-brushing had produced an illusion of thickness where, in truth,
the hair-line had begun to recede.

“Next time, I think we will use the conditioner,” he murmured confidentially. “It’s a bit too dry.”

The sweet smell of lacquer rose to her nostrils like incense, or vanilla ice-cream, she couldn’t decide which. She brought her ringed hands down from protecting her eyes from the fine,
dangerous spray and offered the only excuse possible. “Age, Pierre. Just age.” A grim word to atone for any previous weakness.

“Maturity,” he amended with a twitch of his lips. This was one of Rudi’s famous mots, and she found herself grinning back at him as naturally as if he had been her
dead son.

Ah, that was it, she thought, and the decision relieved her of any misgiving. There must be something about him that put her in mind of Charles. Nothing physical, of course. A sharp visual
recollection pierced her of that fresh-coloured, mischief-loving face under its yellow thatch. There couldn’t be two boys more dissimilar. Perhaps it was simply the relative position of his
age and hers which must be much the same as between mother and son. How old was Pierre? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Charles would have been twenty-five this year had he lived. But how stupid to add
years to the dead. She gave a short, involuntary sigh, as finding herself relieved of the wrapper she rose a little stiffly from the sitting position and made her matter-of-fact way between the two
fully occupied rows of chairs, each with its attendant acolytes.

Rudi half-turned to wish her good day, a favour he bestowed upon few. His expression was, as always, sparkling and malevolent, full of a cynical worldly wisdom. Pierre followed her out through
the truncated swing door which separated salon from reception desk, and Rudi followed them both with his eyes, given full vision by a sort of unglazed window that connected whilst severing the two
departments.

Did Mrs. Chance have any inkling of the faint air of proprietorship with which Pierre helped her on with her excellently tailored tweed coat? The plain answer is that she did not. She was too
busy to spare a thought for anything so nebulous. She scanned the bill for overcharge (though generous she was not gullible), settled with the girl at the till, tipped the shampooer and less
obtrusively, rewarded Pierre for his labours. She made her next appointment, decided not to undo his good work by immediately putting on her smart hat and, holding it in her hand, walked out of the
salon into the snack bar that adjoined it. She would have liked to sit down at one of the small tables with a cup of coffee but she knew that the next temptation would be a Danish pastry and, as
she weighed ten stone on the bathroom scales without a stitch on, she dared not invite an extra ounce. So, with a backward glance at a glass-fronted counter loaded with starch in every shape and
form, she ignored the row of lifts and wandered down the stairs through the intervening stages, into the ground floor department of Botolph’s. She passed through the plate-glass doors into
the busy street and made her way towards the old Butter Market where she had parked her car.

As Pierre re-entered the salon, Rudi swung round on his heel away from the television starlet he was grooming and hissed, half jokingly:

“Heh – turn off the glamour, lover-boy. Can’t have the clients falling for you.”

“What goes on?” demanded the starlet, as blonde as bleach could make her, turning up her false eye-lashes and exposing all her pearly teeth as if for the camera.

“Didn’t you see him making eyes at you?” asked Rudi, turning the subject of his conversation with a wink.

But Pierre was not so easily deluded. He knew that Rudi was talking about Mrs. Chance and that this was an oblique way of delivering a message and a warning, with no humorous intention at
all.

“Take your lunch now,” Rudi advised him. “Mon Dieu, I’m behind with my schedule!” He let out his famous roar. “Yvonne, shampoo Mrs. Garthwaite
slowly. D’you hear? Slowly, please. I’m not nearly finished with this one yet.”

All the ladies under their plastic hoods smiled indulgently as they might have done at the antics of a precocious but lovable child. Rudi had succeeded in establishing his personality here
amongst the solid citizens of Borford just as easily as amongst the denizens of Mayfair.

As if at a signal, three salon workers downed tools and followed on the heels of Pierre as he climbed the narrow track of staircase whose beginnings were hidden by a curtain of strip plastic,
and which led to the staff room above. This was a small, cluttered cell, democratically shared by male and female alike who were only differentiated by the adjoining lavatories. The wall space was
taken up by narrow olive-green lockers, each locker shared by two persons. George Botolph was not one to spend his money where it did not show and the extravagant décor of the salon was not
echoed up here where four canvas chairs (soiled stock) and one small gas-ring did duty for the amenities. With Sadie the manicurist were Gilda and Garry, both juniors. Gilda went straight to her
locker for her purse and then back to the head of the stairs again asking:

“The usual, Sadie? Want me to get yours, Pierre?”

Pierre, who usually lunched on two bath buns and a carton of yoghourt bought from the kitchens serving the snack bar, shook his head. He didn’t bother to thank her, only said curtly,
“Nope. I’m going out for a beer and a sandwich. You carry on.”

He dragged on his raincoat, slipped a comb through his hair, and followed her down.

“What’s biting him?” inquired Sadie idly as she flicked her lighter in the direction of the cigarette she already had in her mouth.

“He’s been ticked off by Rudi. He was getting too thick with Mrs. Chance. Good job Gilda didn’t spot him making up to the old girl.”

“Why ever should she mind?”

“She’s struck on him. Didn’t you know?”

Sadie stared stonily through her cigarette smoke at Master Garry unwrapping his sandwiches. She was a pale, thin girl with a long nose who had a proprietary interest in the flighty Gilda because
they had been at the same school. Otherwise owing to her specialised knowledge, she considered herself a cut above the rest of the staff. Whereas all the other girls wore the current hair style
even to the same tint, which gave them a family resemblance and led to endless complications over the distribution of tips, Sadie’s small skull was as sleek and dark as a blackbird’s.
Her eyes too were bright and cold and she moved about the salon without noise but always on the alert.

Now she said tartly: “I’ve never noticed it.”

“Then you must be slipping. She’s always running errands for him. Fights to do his shampooing, and stares at him like a codfish all the time she’s handing him the
rollers.”

Sadie made no comment but, with her cigarette still in her mouth, filled the kettle and put it on to boil while she assembled the tea-things. By then Gilda was back, clutching a paper bag from
which she took two cellophane-wrapped ham rolls to hand to Sadie, keeping only a packet of potato crisps for herself.

“Here, where’s yours?” asked Sadie sharply.

“I’ve got all I want.”

“What did I tell you?” announced Garry with an air of triumph. “She’s even lost her appetite.”

“Garry says you’re sweet on Pierre,” said Sadie accusingly.

“And if I am,” retorted Gilda, after a moment’s hesitation, “what’s it got to do with any of you?”

“You want to watch your step, my girl,” said Garry. “What you’ve got there is a wolf in hairdresser’s clothing. Didn’t you hear Rudi winding up your
sweetie-pie before he came upstairs for being extra attentive to Mrs. Chance?”

“Rot! She’s a hundred.”

“She’s only half that. And filthy rich.”

“She’s got some really beautiful rings,” observed Sadie. “And not bad hands considering. Nice nails, too. You can tell they’ve always been looked after. Still, you
can’t do much if they aren’t the right shape to begin with.”

Here she cast a complacent glance at her own which were perfect. Gilda promptly sat on hers. She looked angrily at Sadie but decided that Garry was more open to attack.

“What foul thing will you think up next, I wonder?” she demanded with a burst of irritation. “You’re just a nasty, dirty-minded. . . .”

“Here, stop that! I’m only saying how it appeared to Rudi.”

“Oh, Rudi’s simply wild because she ditched him for Pierre. Shows some sense. Now her hair’s done better. He makes her look as good as she can expect to at her age.”

“No one’s crabbing Pierre’s styling. I won’t say he doesn’t do a neat job on Mrs. Chance. Though usually he can’t match up to Rudi. Pierre’s absolutely
licked when it comes to anything longer than ten inches. He hasn’t the experience.”

“Well, Rudi’s been at it too long then. He knows hair, granted, but when he’s dealing with old biddies like Mrs. C. he sticks to what he thinks they’re bound to like.
Now, Pierre can see them in a new light but just because. . . .”

The sound of their bickering washed over Sadie without disturbing the pattern of her train of thought.

She sat silent, deaf to this nonsense which was, anyway, out of her province. She was a single-minded girl and, where her interests were threatened, could be quietly formidable.

She was seeking to remember if, as she sat as handmaiden beside them, there had been any marked difference between Pierre’s treatment of this particular client and the others who came to
him. She determined to watch them together very closely in the future, not because she had any feeling for Mrs. Chance one way or the other, but because if there was any hanky-panky going on, a
revelation of it would be as good a way as any of bringing the infatuated Gilda to her senses.

“What is worrying you, Rudi?” asked his wife that evening at the end of their simple meal.

“Not you for once, my darling,” he replied, giving his darting, mischievous glance at her blossoming mid-way pregnancy as she sat opposite him at table.

“What is it then? Business?”

“Business booms. We have more heads than an executioner. Old Botolph did himself a good turn when he wooed me from the great metropolis – eh?”

“And us a good turn too,” she pointed out.

“Yes, indeed. This is better than three rooms in Kentish Town.”

Rudi, who was half French-Swiss with a Viennese mother, and who had made this unlikely combination work for him instead of allowing it to split him into three equally tortured personalities, had
further divided his unborn child by taking an English wife. He was immensely proud of his brand-new, heavily mortgaged, semi-detached house, the first they had ever owned, and at weekends strutted
down its narrow garden path, surveying clods of virgin earth, with all the enthusiasm of a landed proprietor.

“Just the place for breeding, eh?”

“You make me sound like a prize sow,” she objected.

“Prize sows are very valuable. I do not see why you should mind. But I do not insist on a litter – is that the word for it? I want only one little perfect son and you can take it
from me, my love, he shall never be a hairdresser. Thank God, I rescued you from that hell in time to save your sanity.”

“It is the salon then?”

“It’s that mauvais sujet, Peter Drew, if you must know.”

“Pee-airre!” she mocked him, rolling the r’s.

“Pee-airre . . . from Shepherd’s Bush, Islington or maybe south of the river.”

“I warned you. I know these types.”

“But what could I do?” he shrugged unhappily. “There is no one trained locally capable of dressing the tail of a horse. The advertisement in the trade paper brought only the
one answer. The up-and-comings do not like to leave London and I bet this one had his reasons. Oh, I know that I could have had Basil. He was dying to work with me again. But he is too obviously
what he is and what goes down in the West End does not do in the provinces. I cannot do all myself. I must have another male stylist – for some of these madams will not accept a girl, however
good. Here is a male, sans doute. So far he has behaved with caution. He has an eye on a junior and dates her in the evenings. Not my affair. But today he had the impertinence to set his
cap at one of my clients.”

“With all those dizzy, tinsel blondes pouring in from the television studio, what can you expect?”

“If it were one of those, my angel, I would look the other way – much as it would go against the grain. But this is a most respectable matron, the wife of James Chance who owns a
chain of garages in this town, who is buddies with my esteemed boss, George Botolph, and who is, furthermore, lined up for next year’s Lord Mayor. I have it on the best of authority. Honest
George himself.”

“What were you doing to let a client like that out of your own hands?”

Rudi looked sheepish. “Thereby hangs a tale. Naturally, I spotted her for someone of importance the moment she entered the salon which was within a week of its opening. As you know I am
good at detecting the aristocracy of the bourgeoisie. I cut and set her hair for her several times myself. We appeared to get on famously. Then one day it transpired . . .” he exposed the
palms of his hands in a gesture of humorous deprecation. “I got behind as usual.”

“Oh, Rudi!”

“I am an artist. I cannot be hurried.”

“You are a muddler.”

“The upshot of it was that Pierre stood in for me and she henceforth transferred her allegiance.”

“You mean he did it better than you?”

“Alas, these things happen. To be fair, he is clever, that one. And with Mrs. Chance he had an inspiration. I had been seeking to discover a remnant of beauty for the poor lady. He saw at
once that the only hope for that very plain mug was to render it distinguished. Which he proceeded to do to the full extent of his art. And the lady having her head screwed on the right way despite
its plainness soon saw the difference. And so. . . .”

“If she has her head screwed on the right way and is really a lady, I can’t see what there is to worry about.”

“Not all women are ladies, but all ladies are women, my sweet innocent. And at that age they are ripe for any foolishness.”

His wife was thoughtful for a moment. She did not truly question his judgement for the French-Swiss half of Rudi was seldom deceived. Her own experience of the trade in a high-class
establishment had given her an insight into its scandals and pitfalls. She knew that even in London one unscrupulous o. . .