‘My clients don’t tend to voice publicly their involvement with me. Nobody brags about paying somebody else to decorate their house—they like that cachet of excellent taste and access to rare objects themselves.’ She winked and took a sip of her champagne. ‘Besides, I decorated herbrother’shouse. Not Clementine’s, if you see what I mean?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Charlie, who wished rich people would speak directly.
‘I mean, Charlie, that it was Maisy’s father, Jimmy Bell, who had his house filled with French antiques. Jimmy Bell who controls Bell Oil. Jimmy Bell who decides the allowances his siblings getand’—she lowered her voice to almost a whisper—‘Clementine and Mason are on the family board for show … One hears things.’
‘Got it,’ said Charlie, writing a note to check the shareholder roster for Bell Oil. ‘Jimmy controls the Bell purse strings.’
‘Follow the money, Charlie. It’s always worked for me in my line of work, and I’m sure it’s useful in yours.’ She took another sip of her champagne.
‘Do you know if Clementine and Mason were close with Maisy’s parents?’
‘Jimmy and Dolly? As close as family can be. I mean, Jimmy holds the reins to the company and that always comes with complications. And he’s gravely ill. Dolly doesn’t leave his side. Every bit the devoted wife. It was Clementine who dropped young Maisy off at college.
‘I was doing their front foyer and bedroom at the time and Dolly insisted Clementine stay to help choose the paint colour (it was a cool white, I might add). Clementine brought Miss Maisy on this graduation trip to Paris. From my brief interactions with the family, Clementine and Maisy seem close—certainly Clementine showed a keen interest in her niece. Very much the doting aunt.’ Lady Ashworth rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘Maisy’s father’—she shook her head with obvious sadness—‘has some awful affliction. Tremors, coughs, confined to a chair almost full time now, I believe. Terrible.’ She tutted. ‘The family has a lot on their plate. I’d say they are as happy and conflicted as any other family, oil money or not.’
Charlie didn’t know what Lady Ashworth meant. She missed her own parents and siblings back in Sydney and couldn’t imagine fighting her siblings for an estate. Her parents were comfortable, her father a barrister, but nothing on the grand scale of the Bells. She dismissed her pang of homesickness.
Charlie noticed Lady Ashworth talked around Maisy’s parents—their house, their antiques, rather than personal qualities. Maisy’s parents had not accompanied the young woman on her celebration trip. Now she was missing, her parents sent a proxy family member—the brother, Mason Bell. Why wouldn’t Maisy’s mother come to look for her daughter?
There was more to this story than Lady Ashworth was revealing. Or perhaps knew.
Charlie looked at the picture of Maisy Bell. The young woman appeared almost ethereal: perfect white teeth, styled blonde waves, bright smile with a slight dimple in each cheek and makeup done just so. This photo could have been a trial run for a movie poster. She cast her mind back to the first profile she’d filed in Paris: a puff piece on Lady Ashworth’s villa in Versailles. An interview about her in-demand interior design and French furniture business between Paris and the United States. Lady Eleanor Ashworth had decorated brownstones in New York for the Fricks and Vanderbilts, as well as updating Windsor Castle just outside London. If Lady Ashworth said the Bell pile in Texas was the biggest she’d seen, that would be no exaggeration.
Charlie decided to continue with her line of questioning. ‘Can you tell me what you know about Maisy?’
‘Fearfully wealthy, pockets bigger than her brain, wanted to be an actress and given a small part Off-Broadway.’ Lady Ashworth dropped her voice. ‘If the rumours are true, a certain Mr Bell funded a certain theatre company in New York in exchange for a young Texan to be given a walk-on.’ She winked and threw her hands in the air. ‘But who knows? Perhaps Maisy Bell has talent? She could wear a frock, that’s for sure.’
‘So she made an impression that night at the Ritz?’ asked Violet, whose head had shot up at the mention of fashion.
‘An impression? She’s like a jewel. Dazzling and precious. New and shiny. Who wouldn’t be attracted to that?’ Lady Ashworth replied, picking at the corner of a sandwich with her index finger and delicately depositing a crumb in her mouth.
‘Who wouldn’t?’ Charlie agreed, choosing to ignore Lady Ashworth’s jibe at the young woman’s acting ambition. Hadn’t Charlie once also harboured a dream that was considered laughable? Charlie James had been looking down the barrel of a dreary life on the women’s pages of a Sydney broadsheet before she moved to Paris and reinvented her life and career as an investigative reporter.
Lady Ashworth had also created a new career across two continents—and a substantial social network around the world.
‘Did Miss Bell have a boyfriend back home?’
‘No idea! I’m connected to the parents, remember? Did you tell your parents about all your young loves?’ Lady Ashworth studied Charlie, who turned her head away as she felt her cheeks grow warm. Violet swallowed and pretended to study a woman sitting in the opposite corner, obviously avoiding this tricky subject. It was unlike Violet to play coy.
Charlie had to reach back over a decade to find that giddy feeling of limerence as a young woman in Sydney, if she ever had it. Had Charlie ever been considered a shiny person on the cusp of adventure when she moved to Paris? No, Charlie James had arrived in France months ago broken and three-quarters divorced, and she did not currently have a lover—clandestine or otherwise.
She looked down at the fancy new clothes gifted to her by Violet and marvelled at how she now felt comfortable sitting at a table with two of the most elegant women in Paris. That would never have been the case when she’d arrived with a suitcase full of sensible pencil skirts, kitten heels and ill-fitting blazers.
Charlie James had come to Paris to reinvent herself. Perhaps Maisy Bell had too?
Lady Ashworth caught Charlie taking stock. ‘I see you have added some special pieces to your own wardrobe. That coral suit is perfect against your auburn hair—I swear it looks like it was made just for you.’ She gave a discreet smile. ‘Your friends Violet and Aleksandr have a great eye.’
Aleksandr Ivanov was the darling of Paris couture, and it was Violet who had helped him launch his label, organising and stylingparades in a cabaret club. Violet and Aleksandr were collaborators and lovers whose shared love of fashion had tipped over into business. Lady Ashworth had thrown her support behind the house, opening both her contact and cheque books; she was the very vortex of the Paris fashion, social, arts and political scenes. Nothing significant happened in Paris without a connection to Lady Ashworth.
Not even, it seemed, the disappearance of an American tourist.
‘Thank you, Lady Ashworth, for the compliment. Aleksandr and Violet spoil me,’ said Charlie, embarrassed. ‘As you are well aware, I’m no clothes horse—’
‘You are certainly not. You wear the clothes, Charlie James, not vice versa. That is the biggest compliment a woman can give another.’
‘I concur,’ said Violet. ‘You are magnificent. The clothes shine because of you. You just had to meet them.’
‘Merci,’ Charlie said, brushing their kind words aside. Australians hated compliments but in France, they were dished out like aperitifs. ‘Back to Maisy Bell. Did you notice if she spoke to anyone in particular, more than others? Any men?’