CHAPTER ONE
The note from Nancy Mitford was delivered by a young boy in short trousers, which made Louisa laugh. Anyone would think it was Dickensian London, but this was 1937 and there were telephones and telegrams. Nancy had always been curiously old-fashioned, for all her love of cocktails and Chanel; Louisa rather loved her for it. The envelope was thick white paper and in the top left-hand corner was By Hand in black ink, underlined. The card inside had ‘Mrs Peter Rodd’ and Nancy’s Maida Vale address embossed on it, but the first thing Louisa noticed was that the note had been scrawled – in haste, perhaps. Nancy’s handwriting was usually easy to read, but not here. Louisa squinted and held the card a little closer.
Decca missing. M&F frantic. Police hopeless. Please come to Rutland Gate. Urgently. Nx
A summons from Nancy was not an altogether unusual thing, but the last time it had happened Louisa had ended up on a liner in the Mediterranean with Lady Redesdale, Nancy’s mother, and Nancy’s sisters, Diana and Unity, and they had become embroiled in a murder and the murkier side of British government. Admittedly, it hadn’t all been Nancy’s fault. Louisa looked down at the floor, where her baby girl, Maisie, almost a year old, was lying on the rag rug, happily gurgling at the woollen rabbit she held. Today was Louisa’s final day at home before she joined her husband, Guy Sullivan, at work. From tomorrow, Maisie was going to be looked after by her grandmother, Guy’s ma, who only lived around the corner. Old Mrs Sullivan had muttered her misgivings but Louisa and Guy had stood firm, and when she understood that it was either her or someone else looking after her granddaughter, she had agreed to do it. Now it looked as if Louisa was going to have to ask her mother-in-law to start a day early.
Louisa knew that Nancy was aware of Cannon & Sullivan, the private detective agency she and Guy had established six months previously. They rented a minuscule office space above a betting shop in Hammersmith, with two desks, a filing cabinet and a telephone. In fact, a few months before, when Nancy had sweetly said she’d like to meet Maisie, Louisa suggested they have tea in the office, knowing it would tickle her old friend. They had known each other almost twenty years now, meeting when Louisa had gone to work in the nursery of the Mitford household. In 1919, Louisa had been a bedraggled, frightened young girl escaping London, and Nancy had only just emerged from the schoolroom herself. In many ways, in spite of their differences, they had embarked on early adulthood almost side by side. Their relationship had its complications, but now – married and a mother – Louisa felt she had at last thrown off the shackles of servitude the Mitfords used to invoke in her. Which was why she questioned her hasty response to Nancy’s request. Did she want to go, or did she have to go? Rutland Gate meant Lord and Lady Redesdale, her former employers – and not people given to thinking of former servants as anything but.
And yet.
Decca, the sisters’ nickname for Jessica, the second to last youngest of the seven siblings, was nineteen years old, and Louisa had a hunch that the situation had to be more serious than her spending one night too many with a friend.
Not to mention that this could be Louisa’s first official piece of work for Cannon & Sullivan.
Louisa picked her daughter up from the floor, held her warm, dumpling body close and kissed her smudge of a nose. ‘Let’s go and see Granny, shall we? Your mother has got to go to work.’
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Fellowes
