Murder At The Masque
Read Murder At The Masque Online
Authors: Amy Myers
Amy Myers
The fourth Auguste Didier crime novel
Copyright © 1991 Amy Myers
The right of Amy Myers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013
All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical characters – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 4722 1386 0
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
London NW1 3BH
Contents
Amy Myers was born in Kent. After taking a degree in English Literature, she was director of a London publishing company and is now a writer and a freelance editor. She is married to an American and they live in a Kentish village on the North Downs. As well as writing the hugely popular Auguste Didier crime series, Amy Myers has also written five Kentish sagas, under the name Harriet Hudson, that are also available in ebook from Headline.
Praise for Amy Myers’ previous Victorian crime novels featuring Auguste Didier, also available in ebook from Headline: ‘Wittily written and intricately plotted with some fine characterisation. Perfection’
Best
‘Reading like a cross between Hercule Poirot and Mrs Beeton . . . this feast of entertainment is packed with splendid late-Victorian detail’
Evening Standard
‘What a marvellous tale of Victorian mores and murders this is – an entertaining whodunnit that whets the appetite of mystery lovers and foodies alike’
Kent Today
‘Delightfully written, light, amusing and witty. I look forward to Auguste Didier’s next banquet of delights’
Eastern Daily Press
‘Plenty of fun, along with murder and mystery . . . as brilliantly coloured as a picture postcard’
Dartmouth Chronicle
‘Classically murderous’
Woman’s Own
‘An amusing Victorian whodunnit’ Netta Martin,
Annabel
‘Impossible to put down’
Kent Messenger
‘An intriguing Victorian whodunnit’
Daily Examiner
Also by Amy Myers and available in ebook from Headline
Victorian crime series featuring Auguste Didier
1. Murder in Pug‘s Parlour
3. Murder at Plum’s
5. Murder makes an Entrée
6. Murder under the Kissing Bough
7. Murder in the Smokehouse
8. Murder at the Music Hall
And Kentish sagas written under the name Harriet Hudson also available in ebook from Headline
Look for Me by Moonlight
When Nightingales Sang
The Sun in Glory
The Wooing of Katie May
The Girl from Gadsby’s
When master chef Auguste Didier decides he needs a rest in his native Cannes he is convinced that there at least he will not encounter murder which seems recently to have stalked him as inexorably as Jack the Ripper his victims. No cold hand of violent death could possibly touch this delightful place of sun and warmth . . .
But back in London Inspector Egbert Rose of Scotland Yard is investigating a series of jewel burglaries. Only when he meets the sixth victim, ballerina Natalia Kallinkova, does he realise this is no ordinary case. For each missing jewel had been encased in an exquisite Fabergé egg, the gift of the Grand Duke Igor of Russia to his ex-mistresses. Worse, he discovers there is a seventh egg . . . and Inspector Rose sets off hot-foot to warn its owner – in Cannes.
There, the Gentlemen (the English, under the captaincy of the Prince of Wales) are about to engage the Players (the rest of the world) in a to-the-death cricket match. And where such passions are raised, murder is sure to follow . . .
For Marian,
with love
For the purposes of this story the Tsar Alexander II has been credited with an additional son, the Grand Duke Igor. He, his household and the Villa Russe are fictitious, as are the other active participants in the plot. For information on the Cannes Cricket Club I am indebted to Patrick Howarth’s fascinating
When the Riviera was Ours
(Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1977); the pavilion, however, is my own invention.
La Fabuleuse Histoire de Cannes
by Jean Bresson (Editions du Rocher, Monaco, 1981) provided much information on the history of the grand villas of the town;
The Man Behind the Iron Mask
by John Noone (Alan Sutton, 1988) provided comprehensive details of the mysterious prisoner kept on the Ile Ste Marguérite, and in particular an epilogue concerning rumours of the ghost recently seen near the old town in Le Suquet. It is a fictitious extension on my part to cast this apparition back nearly a century, but with stories about Iron Mask circulating in the town ever since the masked prisoner arrived, it did not seem to me far-fetched.
I am, as ever, grateful to my agent Dorothy Lumley for her constant support, and to Jane Morpeth and all at Headline for making the path to publication so pleasant; to Rodney Burton; and to the Bibliothèque Municipale in Cannes, situated so appropriately in the former Villa Rothschild on the route de Fréjus. A special thank-you to the artist Natalie Greenwood, who so expertly interpreted Inspector Rose’s sketch of the Cannes Cricket Pavilion.
Auguste Didier stepped off the Calais-Mediterranean Express and sniffed. He gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. Ah, the perfume of the air. The scents of the pines of the Esterel mountains and the hillside flowers still filled the air of his native village with their warm magic. Some said Cannes belonged only to the English, that it had become the new battleground of Europe with the Romanovs to the east on the hill of la Californie and the English to the west on the route de Fréjus. But to those who really knew it, Cannes was still Cannes, the small fishing village that over the centuries had seen invaders come and go, Romans, Greeks, Saracens, Italians. Here he had been born in a small house on the hillside of Mont Chevalier, gone to the small school in the Rue du Barri. Here he had been apprenticed to
Le Maître
, the great Auguste Escoffier. Cannes was in his blood, a village blessed by the heavens.
‘Murder! It’s murder, I say.’
Auguste spun round at the shrill sound of an undoubtedly English aristocratic voice disturbing the peace of the south. He smiled with relief when, peering curiously outside into the Place de la Gare, he saw a familiar scene. Skirts rustling in indignation, an English lady was waving her lace-edged pink parasol threateningly at an uncomprehending cabbie who was merely persuading his bored horse by time-honoured means to begin yet another journey to the Hôtel du Parc. Or perhaps to the Hôtel Gonnet, though with the seaside front position the latter
was not so popular. It would not suffice for this stiffly corseted martinet with her fashionable trained carriage dress.
Murder indeed. Auguste laughed at himself. He must have murder on the brain.
‘A holiday,’ the secretary of Plum’s Club for Gentlemen had said to its
maître
chef reproachfully. ‘You need a holiday, Monsieur Didier. It isn’t like you to forget the truffles in the Chicken Bayonnaise.’
There had been A Complaint. About
his
food. And moreover it had been justified. Auguste had been appalled. How could it have happened? He had briefly contemplated suicide, and had decided against it. Honour could be restored another way. After his holiday, they would be waiting for him with open arms – or rather mouths – after six weeks of Monsieur Archibald Binks’s efforts. Pah! Trained in the Marshall School. The school gave excellent training for cooking treacle pudding no doubt. But the gentlemen of Plum’s required
la vrai cuisine
. Auguste gloated with satisfaction. He would return and cook them delicacies such as they had never imagined, inspired by the perfumes and tastes of his native land.
The smell of the coffee from the café tabac in the railway station recalled him from theorising on how to transform Alexis Soyer’s turkey
à la Nelson
into something edible – the sauce, he wondered, was that the mistake? Omit the tomato perhaps? He found his
billet de baggage
, exchanged ritual imprecations with a porter who tried to relieve him of his hand luggage with the practised ease of the French, bypassed the crowd of English
hiverneurs
, arranged for the delivery of his modest suitcases to his parents’ home and walked out into the Place de la Gare, a happy man. He was home.