BOOK 3
The Pocket in Look Seven
The Cutting Room Lost and Found
A missing silver thimble. A telling photograph. A pocket that should not be there.
Show week at Spindle Street School of Fashion runs on garment bags, borrowed time and Inez Barral’s handwritten tags. Then, minutes before the runway show begins, the velvet box is opened. The silver thimble passed from one graduating class to the next is missing.
A backstage photograph offers a tantalising clue: a silver glint in the pocket of Look Seven. There is just one problem. The jacket that walks the runway has no pocket at all.
As Inez and Gloria Kent work through alternate outfits, muddled records and closely guarded secrets, suspicion settles on quiet, gifted Dallas North. His skill with pockets may cost him the recognition he has earned—and graduation is almost here.
Inez has spent a working lifetime backstage while other people take the bows. She will not stand by while a young maker loses his. But to recover the thimble, she must look beyond what everyone thinks the photograph proves.
Read the opening ↘A FIRST LOOK INSIDE
Chapter One
On the Thursday of show week, at one o’clock, Inez Barral was where she had been at one o’clock on the day of every fashion show she had ever worked: in a back room, with a pincushion on her wrist, out of sight.
This back room was the alterations room at Spindle Street School of Fashion, on the ground floor behind the runway hall. It was a long, low room with a row of sewing machines along one wall and, along the other, a rail. The rail ran the whole length of the room and held, in garment bags, every look in the graduating class’s spring show: forty-two looks, plus alternates and spares, each in its own bag with its own number. For three days the rail had been the busiest place in the building. Anything that came off it for a fitting or a fix or a steam was signed out on a buff tag, and signed back in when it came home, and the person who kept the tags was Inez.
It had been her own idea. She had suggested it to Harriet Voss in March, at the lending committee, as a way of making sure nothing went missing during the most chaotic week of the school year. Harriet had said yes, of course, a form. Inez had said a tag, and Harriet had looked at her as if she had suggested a new religion, and agreed.
So now there was a card table at the end of the rail, with a cash box on it and a corkboard propped against the wall behind it, and on the corkboard, on pushpins, the tags. Buff for out. White for in. Each with a look number, a time, and a set of initials. By one o’clock on Thursday there were thirty-one tags on the board, and Inez had written every one of them.
“Look Twelve,” said a dresser, arriving at a run. “Hem’s down.”
“Out,” said Inez, writing. “Twelve, one-oh-two. Initials.”
The dresser scribbled and was gone with the bag over her shoulder.
End of excerpt