‘Darling, I knew you’d be in,’ the voice on the line said. ‘There’s something I’d like some help with.’
Billie took a deep breath and slouched back on the bed. Her eyes darted to the small clock of her pink celluloid vanity dresser set. She wasn’t ready for The Dancers yet, but didn’t need to be either. She supposed she had a little time to spare. ‘Okay, but I’m not in all night. I’m going out on a job,’ she stressed. ‘See you shortly.’ She hung up.
Billie completed a rushed lipstick job, blotted her lips, scrutinised herself in the mirror and, reasonably satisfied, pulled on her foundation garments and slipped into the sleek red gown. A turn at the full-length mirror told her she would pass, though her neck was bare and her hair needed work, particularly at the back, before she faced Sydney’s top end of town. Anyway, her first task was to talk with Ella. She still had plenty of time to get to the office and meet her assistant, if she could keep the length of this visit to a minimum.
Chapter Five
Billie Walker took the stairs to the next level of the building and sauntered down the corridor to the large corner flat. The door was unlocked. Familiar as she was with it, she knocked and entered almost in the same breath and found the Baroness Ella von Hooft in her favourite spot before the large window, her lady’s maid, Alma McGuire, pouring her a sherry in a delicate crystal glass with a pair of strong, steady hands.
Alma nodded to Billie with a bob of her curled and neatly pinned silver and strawberry hair, and the ever-elegant Ella turned and spotted her daughter. ‘Darling, it’s been weeks since I saw you,’ she exclaimed.
‘Mother, it’s been since Sunday,’ Billie corrected her. The baroness did have a flair for the dramatic. ‘And we live in the same building, after all. I’m hardly in Berlin.’ She walked over to the settee and bent to give her mother a kiss on her scented cheek. As usual, she smelled pleasantly of Chanel No 5, a staple she clearly had no intention of giving up, no matter her financial circumstances.
‘Don’t call me that,’ Ella said with a wave of her manicured hand. ‘Mother. You know how I hate it. It makes me feel old.’
Billie sighed.
Tonight Ella wore sequins and silk, her darkly dyed cropped hair set in impeccable marcel waves, tight to the head and curled gently at porcelain cheekbones. One might assume she was dressed this way because she’d come from a lavish dinner, but Billie knew perfectly well that she dressed like this for dinner every night as a matter of course, whether she had company or not. If you don’t take pride in yourself, what is the point in living? she’d often say. As a once-divorced and now recently widowed Dutch aristocrat, the third of five daughters of Baron von Hooft, a former mayor of Arnhem, Ella had grown up with wealth and had never really let go of her taste for the finer things, even when her situation had become ‘strained’, financially speaking.
Something of a free spirit, Ella had lived a large life, having come to Australia from Holland with her first husband, only to have him take up a rather too public affair. It was then that she’d met Billie’s father, Barry Walker, a former cop turned PI, whom she had hired to gain the necessary proof of adultery, which was rather easy, as the story goes. What she hadn’t counted on was Barry’s gallantry and charm. They’d fallen in love hard and fast. She’d had Billie out of wedlock, something a woman without a title could have barely survived. But Ella had the title and the money to support herself and her little family, and she’d weathered the scandal in the way the upper classes sometimes did. She was a savvy, determined woman. She had done her time as a good girl, and it hadn’t paid off, as she saw it, so she’d married the man she wanted, had the baby she craved, and to hell with social expectations. Ella had not changed her name, either, which was just the sort of thing she would dig her heels in about, and Billie’s dad wouldn’t give a toss about. Barry Walker had been a thoroughly modern man, in his way, happy to let Ella be her own woman, an idiosyncratic and passionate ‘goddess’, as he’d liked to call her. They’d been a good match, Barry and Ella. Billie missed her dad keenly, and she knew her mother did too. Since his death her mother had seemed listless, and a touch more demanding, which wasn’t something Billie felt like dealing with tonight.
‘Let me have a look at you,’ Ella von Hooft said to her daughter. ‘Give us a whirl. Where are you going tonight?’
‘I’m not going to give you a whirl. I’m on a case,’ Billie said, not in the mood for play.
‘Being on a case doesn’t make you invisible, does it? Certainly not in that dress.’
Invisibility would be handy sometimes, Billie thought.
‘Have a drink with me.’ Her mother changed tack, patting the seat beside her.
Billie sat next to Ella on the plush emerald-green settee, crammed with jewel-coloured cushions of ruby and emerald velvet and silk. Alma poured her a tipple, a quiet smile on her ruddy, weathered face. Against Ella’s exciting presence, Alma appeared as calm and solid as the Pyramids of Giza. An Irish immigrant, Alma hadn’t family of her own. She’d first come on to help with newborn Billie, and as Billie had grown older Alma had taught her to sew and mend. She had patience, a steady hand and keen eye for details, and she’d soon made herself indispensable. The other staff had been let go over the years, but she was always there. Ella would spend her last shilling to keep Alma, Billie knew, and unlike the other tenants in Cliffside, Ella had Alma live in the flat with her. She had a fair-sized room at the east end of the flat as her personal quarters and Billie understood it housed a near library-sized collection of paperback romance novels and copies of Talk of the Town and True Confessions, though the part of Alma that indulged in them remained well hidden beneath a sober surface.
There was a shared maids’ quarters at the top of the building, with beds side by side and a kitchen where the staff made meals for their various employers, but Ella wouldn’t hear of it. In truth the two women were inseparable, particularly since Billie’s father had passed on. While Billie and her mother sipped their drinks, Alma walked off to the kitchen to see to something that smelled quite divinely of sweetness and cinnamon. To add to her many talents, the woman was an impressive baker.
Ella had her eyes on Billie, thinking something over. ‘You know, your line of work shows you the worst of people. It exposes every nasty instinct,’ she pronounced.
‘Isn’t that what you found exciting about it?’ Billie shot back. She leaned against the cushions and smiled, then took a sip of her sherry. This was a well-worn track for them.
Barry Walker had been charming and, behind his sometimes tough exterior, rather soft-hearted and compassionate too, but that probably wasn’t all that had appealed to Ella von Hooft. Certainly he was the opposite of her first husband, if the stories were anything to go by, but it was more than that. Billie’s first and happiest memories were from the end of the roaring twenties, a freer time in many respects, with an aristocratic mother who was more than happy to ‘slum it’ – as others liked to say behind her back – with her dad, the baroness painting the town red each weekend with her PI, and insisting on throwing extravagant parties in her two-storey home, attended by intellectuals, performers and artists, and a fair-sized staff in keeping with the standards of her Dutch childhood. The fact that the disapproval of others never fazed Ella was just one more reason Billie respected her. She thought Alma, her loyal lady’s maid, felt the same, despite what Billie took to be more conservative leanings. Her mother rather had a taste for the gritty, Billie suspected, despite her protestations and fiercely glamorous exterior. She was indeed a woman of contrasts.