The Winter Ground

16

We were given the inspector’s address by a startled constable who came to the door of the police house in Blairgowrie in shirtsleeves and braces. Behind him a lively pack of small children in nightgowns were scampering up and down the stairs and his attempts to shush them only turned the row they were making from cheerful shouts into loud whispers and explosive giggling.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, madam,’ said the constable, ‘but there’s no settling them tonight.’ He gestured along the garden to the police station proper, its blue lamp gleaming out. ‘I can easy open the office for you.’

We assured him once again that it was his superior upon whom we had our sights and I – after a brainwave – added a firm promise that any possible repercussions arising from the inspector being disturbed on this of all evenings would lie with us alone. I had guessed correctly and, thus mollified, the constable wished us the compliments of the season and bade us goodnight.

‘You can drop us off and then get on your way, Alec,’ I said, as we hurried back to the motor car. ‘What time are you expected at Pess?’

‘Oh, I’ll telephone to them and apologise for dinner,’ Alec said, glancing distractedly at his watch. ‘There’s a crowd tonight, I shan’t be missed.’

Hutchinson, thankfully, seemed not at all disturbed by our sudden intrusion into his evening. He lived in a neat little stone villa on the Perth Road, two bay windows with a lit porch between, where the door was opened by an equally neat little wife, swathed in a white apron and smelling of spices.

‘You’ll be after Maynard,’ she said and, with a quick downward look which told us more clearly than a command that we should wipe our feet before entering, she led us into a sitting room.

‘Maynard,’ I mouthed to Alec as we followed her.

‘Now you’ll have to excuse me,’ said Mrs Hutchinson when she had installed us and turned up the gas, ‘but I’m cooking for the morn’s morn as you can imagine and my daughter will be here any minute with the bairns, so I’d best get on.’

Alec, Ina and I waited like schoolchildren in the headmaster’s study, glancing around ourselves at the lace cover on the piano, the shining leaves of the potted palms and the brush marks on the thick carpet, evidence of a recent fierce sweeping. I wondered how Inspector Hutchinson managed to maintain his dishevelment in a household where not a single palm frond nor tassel was out of place, or alternatively how the housewife who had scoured those ridges into the nap of her good carpet could bear the dull shoes and crumpled trousers of her mate.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Hutchinson, bursting in on my thoughts. He stood in the doorway exuding welcome, pipe tobacco and whisky, and a close look at him showed that his face, always mottled, was this evening as decorative as some kind of rare orchid, in purple and yellow patches. I began to wish we at least had been a little more temperate, perhaps telephoning to Hutchinson after Boxing Day; suddenly the great rush of discovery was looking a little threadbare as I gathered myself for my report.

I should not have worried. Inspector Hutchinson listened with as much avidity as I had ever seen in him, sitting forward and fastening his gaze upon me as I spoke. Of course, if it had been Sergeant McClennan the avid effect would have been the more impressive (Hutchinson’s keenest look was still more reminiscent of an elderly bloodhound waiting for table scraps than of a terrier snapping and raring to go).

‘No whiff of a motive,’ he said, sitting back once I had finished, which was a quelling start, ‘but opportunity and something of a track record.’ He clapped his hands together and then smacked them down on to his knees, making his feet jump. ‘With opportunity and a history of mischief, I think even my super is going to have to listen to me.’

‘And don’t forget the witness,’ Ina said, simpering. Inspector Hutchinson turned his pouchy eyes upon her, and Alec and I, who had seen the like of what was coming once before, drew back to remove ourselves from the line of fire.

‘A witness?’ he said. ‘Now, you see, madam, a witness – to my way of thinking – is not just “a buddy that saw what happened”. No, a witness is a person of sound understanding and good character who can come through cross-examination making sense and looking as pure as the driven snow. What we have in this case is an informant, a very useful type of creature, of course, but we have no witness. Ah well, we’ll manage without one.’

Ina took at least half of this speech to begin to comprehend it, for the inspector’s avuncular look and respectful tone were most misleading, but when she did she sat back reddening and with her mouth slightly open.

‘In fact, I’ll not keep you hanging about much longer, Mrs Wilson,’ said Hutchinson, ‘but I wonder if you can inform me on one last point? Would you have an address for this nurse?’

Ina shook her head.

‘Aye well, I suppose she could hardly keep up a correspondence with every Tom, Dick and Harry,’ he said. ‘We’ll find her. Now, I’m going to ring up my sergeant to get you a lift home and you can wait for him in the wee room across the way. You’ll not be in anyone’s road there.’

‘You could surely have taken her, Alec,’ I said, when they had left the room. ‘It would get you started on your way. You’re going to be terribly late as it is.’

‘I rather think that Pess will have to do without me after all,’ said Alec. ‘It would take more than the delights it has on offer to tear me away from this now.’

‘They’ll never forgive you,’ I said. ‘You’re burning your boats.’

How perverse that just when he was turning from the prospect I finally began to urge him towards it.

‘Some boats are best burnt,’ Alec said.

The inspector returned to us within minutes and Mrs Hutchinson, her cooking evidently in hand, unbent enough to bring a tray of cocoa and biscuits although she gave a marked look at both the biscuits and her carpet and left me in no doubt that food in the parlour was a great concession and I should be very careful (as Nanny used to say at nursery suppers) to eat over my plate.

‘Now, it would take more of a man than me to knock up the super tonight,’ said the inspector. ‘He’ll be at the kirk till gone twelve – it’s a big night for the choir – and he’ll be there all day tomorrow, of course. Anyway, I need to speak to the brother first to firm up this earlier crime – there’s no motive there either when you look at it front on, since it was a lass he’s done away with and not a son and heir – but I’m not for bothering him on Christmas Day, are you, madam? No, Boxing Day’s a good day for visiting. So you and me and your man there can just bide our time – have a wee dram and a good chow at the plum pudding – and day after tomorrow I’ll hitch a lift north with you.’

‘It’s going to be a delicate matter,’ I said. ‘Lord Buckie lives in his grief, Inspector, to an extent that is hard to explain.’

‘Wears it like winter drawers, eh?’

The phrase had some aptness if no poetry.

‘And he is far from well. Dying, in fact. Hearing this about his brother might be the end of him.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do a grand job of softening the blow,’ said the inspector. ‘And I’ll be right there to help if you need me.’ I was about to argue with this proposed division of labour, but the memory of Lord Buckie in his library, in his cardigan, and the thought of him wilting under the action of the inspector’s caustic tongue swayed me. I have never thought of myself as having a particular way with words but at least what talents I had did not run to scorching epigrams and unanswerable put-downs of the sort Hutchinson scattered about him; I would make the best of it that I could.

First, though, I had the cosy family Christmas to which I had been looking forward with such simple joy and the prospect was almost enough to make me regret those hordes of relations who were not, by lucky chance, converging upon Gilverton this year. As well as the lingering sulks the circus had engendered – by its withdrawal in the case of the boys and by its development into mayhem as far as Hugh was concerned – all three were feeling bitter about the loss of a day on the hills.

‘Not much of a holiday, Mother,’ said Teddy. ‘Church!’

‘And nothing but stodge to eat all day,’ said Donald.

Indeed, Mrs Tilling always made three kinds of potato to accompany the goose as well as strengthening her bread sauce with barley until it stood up in the sauceboat with a spoon in it like a flagpole on a hilltop, and then there was nothing at tea which had not had the benefit of a little suet somewhere in its gestation, and neither Hugh nor Nanny would countenance a winter morning which did not open with porridge; by suppertime on the typical Christmas Day a steam engine, ploughing into any one of us, would not have knocked us off beam.

My day was brightened, although Hugh’s was not, by the late addition to our party (for I could not in all conscience ignore Alec’s plight, no matter what he had said about a quiet day at home and a cutlet). He arrived, just after breakfast, bearing gifts of such finely judged propriety that they made me smile: a box of excellent cigars for Hugh, lavish heaps of silly games and sickly chocolates for the boys and, for me, a rare lily bulb wrapped in instructions for its successful growth and a hideous little enamelled watering can with which I was supposed to hover over it until it honoured me with a bloom.

Hugh was delighted, no less by the lily bulb than the cigars, I thought, and the day plodded on in its suety way harmlessly enough until just after tea, when we were all gathered in front of the library fire, faced with the big decision of the season: to veto charades and feel oneself a churl or to play charades and half die from embarrassment and boredom. Every year one hopes that the boys will have outgrown the desire and every year one’s hopes are dashed again.

‘Oh, come on, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘One hour of fun, one day a year.’

‘I cannot agree with your summary of your woes,’ I told him. ‘When you are grown up you will look back and see that your lives have been nothing but fun since the day you were born. You are as spoiled as any two children ever were.’

‘I’m not spoiled,’ said Teddy. ‘Gosh, Mother, if you saw the prep we do and how hard we work all term, you wouldn’t begrudge us one measly little game of charades at Christmas.’

‘And anyway,’ said Donald, ‘when I’m grown up, I’ll be doing what Daddy is doing now. Shooting and mucking about and fishing and what have you.’

This was said with such innocence that I could not help laughing even though Hugh’s brows lowered.

‘I have some telephone calls I need to…’ said Alec, fleeing the room and the need to keep his face straight.

‘When I’m grown up I’ll play charades with my children every day after tea,’ said Teddy, as dogged as ever.

‘You’ll be stuck in a law office or stuck in the army, Ted,’ said his brother. ‘I’ll be here playing charades with my children but there’ll be none of that for you.’

Teddy’s face clouded and Donald gave him a look of pure glee.

‘Hugh,’ I said. ‘What have you been-’ I managed to bite my lip, but I had gone too far already. Hugh’s face was stony.

‘No, no, no,’ said Teddy, just as he had ever since he was a tiny boy, always trying to out-argue his brother and never quite making it. ‘Because maybe Mr Osborne will leave me Dunelgar, so there! Because he’s got no wife and children and we’re practically his family anyway, so there! And Dunelgar is bigger than Gilverton and it’s got better-’

‘Go to your rooms, now, both of you,’ said Hugh. If he had had a whip he might have cracked it.

‘Hugh,’ I said. ‘Christmas Day, dear.’

Donald and Teddy, possibly reading his face more accurately than I, got to their feet and scurried out.

Hugh and I were silent for a minute after they had gone. Then, unwisely, I spoke.

‘What have you been saying?’ I asked again.

‘This place will be Donald’s and that’s that,’ he replied. ‘No point in pussy-footing around the plain facts.’ He paused. ‘But there are rather uglier facts I should rather my sons did not have forced down their throats, Dandy.’

‘Their mother having a job of work to do and having a little help with it is not an ugly fact,’ I said. ‘And it’s hardly shoved down their throats – they know nothing about it.’

The ensuing stubborn silence was still going strong when Alec joined us again. He congratulated us on heading off the charades. He got no answer from either of his hosts. And so another merry Christmas danced to its close. Even Bunty was dejected, missing the circus girls greatly and shooed out of the kitchen by a harassed cook and maids while the unwanted feast was prepared and the even more unwanted leftovers dealt with afterwards.

By ten o’clock on Boxing Day morning, the spirits of all were on the rise again. The staff were having their party, Hugh, Donald and Teddy were back amongst the gorse and bracken with another poor doe in prospect, and Alec, Hutchinson and I were bowling north in the Vauxhall tourer which had been Alec’s Christmas present to himself.

‘Much more economical than the Bentley,’ he said, when I raised my eyebrows at the sight of it. I was familiar with the undentable male philosophy that the purchase of a new motor car can save pots of money, and so I said nothing.

Bunty, full of cold potato and therefore good cheer, was standing on the back seat with Alec’s spaniel, Milly, their two heads stuck out into the wind, eyes streaming and teeth snapping at gusts, while Inspector Hutchinson gathered his coat round him and assured us that the fresh air would do him the world of good. (He did look rather grey after his ‘wee dram’, and Alec’s driving, with or without a new engine to run in, is never quite like a nursemaid rocking a cradle.)

‘And at least we know Robin Laurie is not going to be there,’ Alec said as he swung sharply on to a bridge, bounced over its summit and hooked his way back out on to the road again (why the bridge makers and road makers of this land could not have sat down together over a can of tea in their bothy and organised the join between their two enterprises, I have never been able to see, but any road with a goodly share of bridges upon it always gives a slight feeling of going in and out of the dusky bluebells; on the current occasion, Inspector Hutchinson gave a soft moan).

‘Do we?’

‘I rang round,’ Alec said. ‘Caught as many of the Benachally dinner gang as I could put a telephone number to. I’m going to have to have them all at Dunelgar for a party – that was my pretext – but I managed to work Robin in a few times and apparently he’s in town.’

‘Odd,’ I said. ‘His brother’s last Christmas by all reckoning and whether Robin is the paragon of fraternal affection Lord Buckie thinks him, or a vulture ravening after the spoils to come – the more likely alternative, given what we know now, don’t you think? – I’d have bet high stakes he’d be up there.’

The winter weather – most disobligingly given the expectations one has inherited from so many Christmas cards – had abandoned the tingling crispness of recent weeks in favour of fog and drizzle and the morning had seen Perthshire at its most unutterably grim, when the stink of winter fodder and the soft oppressiveness of a thousand damp pine trees seep in at the edges of the window frames and take over the house. But there must be some point on the globe where latitude begins to trump meteorological pressure, where the weather simply gives up and hands responsibility over to the Gods of the North. If so, then somewhere between Perth and Banff we reached it and came out into glittering brittle sunshine. To inhale the air was like plunging into a mountain stream and the inspector breathed it in deeply and began to grow some pink and purple patches again.

‘Nice spot,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been much of a one for coming up north. No need for any more of what we get plenty of in Blairgowrie to my mind – I’d rather get the train to the wife’s sister in the Lakes, except for the beer – but this’ll do.’

Lord Buckie, we heard with some surprise upon presenting ourselves at Cullen, was in the garden, taking his morning constitutional, but a hallboy would be dispatched to fetch him in if we would care to step into the library and wait.

I put a hand on the arm of the maid to stop her (for it is often surprisingly hard to stay a well-trained servant in her tracks and certainly they can ignore any amount of verbal persuasion), saying that the gentlemen would go to the library but, if she would direct me to the gardens, I should go to Lord Buckie myself.

The maid seemed to catch the scent of trouble we could not help having brought with us.

‘Nothing wrong is there, madam?’ she said, looking warily at Alec and the inspector. A town maid would surely have identified Hutchinson straight away even with Alec’s complicating presence at his side, but this girl might never have seen a specimen of the type before and so although his air, his notebook, his very winter coat and brown boots, screamed ‘police’ as clearly as would his whistle, she abandoned her short attempt to place the unlikely trio and merely curtsied.

As I let myself through the garden door, I was still wondering about the oddness of a dying man tramping around bare paths in the depths of December but, given the southerly slope of the ground, the high surrounding wall clothed with the delicate skeletons of fanned fruit trees, and the bright mossy green of the winter lawns, dotted with balls of box and with peacocks fashioned from golden-leaved yew, it was very far from being the desolate wasteland of the Gilverton gardens at this time of year, was almost pleasant on such a sunny day.

‘Mrs Gilver?’ Lord Buckie had seen me before I him. He was standing at the end of a long arbour, bare now and very bright with new paint, looking up along a grass path towards me. ‘You creep in and out like a house mouse, my dear,’ he said, ‘but very welcome, always welcome. I am delighted to see you.’

He would not be if he could divine my purpose and I should not, for kindness’ sake, postpone setting it out before him.

‘Lord Buckie,’ I said, ‘I am charged with a very difficult task this morning.’

‘Not bad news?’ he said. ‘Oh my, not Robin!’

‘Not… I have no news of him,’ I said, shrinking from actual reassurance, ‘but I do need to talk to you and I am going to be asking you to revisit very painful memories.’

‘On what… Pardon me, my dear Mrs Gilver, but on what authority? On what grounds?’

I stared unhappily at him. Ought I to tell him that there was a police inspector in his house? That was my authority, after all.

‘I am trying to help someone,’ I said, which sounded feeble even to me, but he was a shrewd as well as a kind old thing, and I fancy he saw that only some urgent purpose could overcome my clear distaste for the task before me. He tucked my hand under his arm and began to walk again, leading me around the paths, among the trees, passing frozen ponds, catching occasional drenches of impossible sweetness from the tiny waxen flowers of some bare-branched shrub which lined the walkways.

‘It’s about your daughter,’ I said.

‘Ambrosine,’ said Lord Buckie, knowing immediately which daughter I meant.

‘And how she died,’ I went on. ‘Did you – forgive me – but did you see it?’

‘I am not sure whether to be glad or sorry, but I did not. Why do you ask?’

‘Did anyone?’

‘Anyone besides Robin, you mean?’

‘Yes. Anyone else.’

‘No,’ said Lord Buckie, ‘he was quite alone, otherwise there might have been a happier outcome. I was here when he came back, soaked to the skin, shivering. Of course I was sure he would be next for the wretched influenza and then I should have no one. But he and I were both spared it.’

‘And was Robin… I do not know how to say this… Was he a fond uncle? Was he a favourite amongst your children?’ Lord Buckie gave a short and rather dry laugh.

‘He was young and full of his own concerns,’ he said. ‘Rather wild, as a matter of fact. Rather wilder even, in his youth, than he is today.’

‘But Ambrosine,’ I persisted, ‘he must have been terribly fond of her to risk his own life that way. Or would you say he is just one of those men who would act without thinking, for anyone?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Lord Buckie. ‘He was decorated – he’s no coward. Perhaps it was unthinking or perhaps he did it for me but it was an unselfish act, of that we can be sure.’

‘Of course, of course,’ I said absently, quaking at the thought of taking his cherished memory and twisting it into a blackened travesty of itself, telling him that Robin had killed, not saved, had hated or at least had felt a cold nothingness, had certainly felt no love.

‘No, I mean a really truly unselfish act,’ Lord Buckie said, and he shook my arm slightly to emphasise his words. ‘My boys went first, you know, in that terrible plague. Two strong lusty boys, snuffed out like candles. And then my two little girls. But I still had my oldest. My heiress. I am a marquis, you see. This is a Scottish marquisate, my dear, not an English earldom.’ He must have seen my look of puzzlement. ‘I inherited my title from my mother. The Marchioness of Banff and Buckie. My grand parents’ only child and what is called these days a game old bird. She laid out these gardens and put in all the heating, you know. Drew up plans herself and fired five builders before she was satisfied. Ah, Mother! But the point is – I am an old man, and I’m beginning to ramble – that any of my five children could have been my heir. The girls as well as the boys.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I had no idea there was such provision.’

He laughed his dry laugh again. ‘Such provision! You make it sound so cobbled together. I have come across the view before amongst you Southerners’ – here he squeezed me to take the sting from the insult – ‘that there is something illicit in our ways. But Amber would have been a worthy successor. She was my mother all over again and of the five… of the five… well, I loved each of them and I shall not say it aloud. But she was the healthiest, finest, strongest girl ever born. Full of mischief, fearless, a rascal when she was a child. The stories and nonsense she used to tell us all. She made me weep with laughter. “Where did you come from?” I’d ask her. “Did the pixies leave you? What did I do to offend the pixies that they left me you?” And she’d laugh back in my face.’ He sighed. ‘It was only poor Ambrosine’s drowning that put Robin in the way of all this.’ He stopped and waved his hand around at the castle and gardens, even waving it at himself, at – one supposed – the marquisate incarnate. ‘So, you see, it was a most unselfish act to have tried to save her. No mistaking that, and I love him for it.’

I said nothing. Here was a motive indeed. Here was a sack of lead to heap on the scales of justice against Robin Laurie. I considered and rejected half a dozen and more ways to tell him, and was silent so long that he turned a querying look upon me.

‘Does any of that help?’

‘Thank you, it does,’ I said. I had decided to say none of it. ‘Now surely you have walked long enough in this cold air. You are not taking very good care of yourself, I must say, although I feel very matronly to be saying so.’

‘You are a child,’ said Lord Buckie, and for the first time I could discern a glimmer of the same charm that Robin could summon with a whistle. ‘And I am fine. I do not know why everyone around me always treats me as though I were dying. I have never been strong, but I am quite well, really.’

I had no reason at all to tamper with this delusion, and I would not have dreamed of being so matronly as all that, so I contented myself with telling him that I and the two friends who had accompanied me would be leaving him in peace again, but first, might I have a word with his cook.

‘My cook?’ He was astonished.

‘I have a piece of business to put through,’ I said. ‘A very delicate piece of business. The trading of a recipe for the honour of another recipe. My Mrs Tilling would not rest when she heard where I was bound.’

‘And what speciality of Cullen is it you are bidding for?’ he said.

I gulped. It had occurred to me while we were talking that the second of my two questions should not be put to him at all – he would have no idea where to find the nurse from all those years ago; he might not even remember the woman’s name – but to the upper servants instead. No one on earth, in my experience, keeps up a correspondence like that of a cook.

‘Mrs Tilling said your cook would know,’ I said, thinking it a great brainwave.

‘Ah, the almond tart!’ said Lord Buckie.

‘Indeed.’

Nurse Currie, I learned in the kitchen, had left Glasgow after ‘thon dreadful winter’ and, unable to face again the kind of emptiness she had found on the Grampian shores, had plumped for a happy medium and was now settled in Stirlingshire, working – so Mrs Mallen told me – in a ‘very nice’ mother and baby nursing home and walking out with a builder.

‘Not, you understand, m’lady, a home for mothers, dear me no’ – Mrs Mallen lowered her voice even at that to prevent the scullery maid, a girl of very tender years, from hearing – ‘but a lying-in hospital for ladies. Happier work she said in her letter to me when she took up the position there, much happier work bringing babies into the world than easing souls out of it. She was shaken to her marrow that terrible Christmas time she was here with us, m’lady.’

I had encountered Mrs Mallens and their m’ladying before in my time and they always amused me. The idea was – in so far as I had ever been able to pin it down firmly – that they had spent so long so deeply embedded in such an exalted household that they had quite forgotten there were such things as commoners in the world and every female guest was an automatic m’lady. Of course, the expectation was that one would correct them and then endure the look of surprised pity as they adjusted one in their view. If, as I did now, one let the matter hang, one put the poor fools in a state of impotent torment from which there was no escape.

‘And so you have her address, Mrs Mallen?’ I said.

She did and, with a great show of effort and much stertorous breathing, she removed her apron and cuffs, washed her hands under the cold tap and stumped off upstairs to her bedroom to copy it out for me. This took an unconscionable length of time but eventually I rejoined Alec and the inspector on the drive and there had been time for the interior of the motor car to heat through beautifully and for Bunty and Milly to recover from the excitement of the reunion and fall back to sleep.

‘Well, he certainly had a motive for that one,’ said the inspector, when I had relayed my discoveries. ‘It beggars belief, this nurse keeping her lip buttoned. Wonder if she’s on the take? Or I tell you what – you said this Laurie character has women stashed here, there and yonder. She might be another of them.’

‘What I said was that he has an understanding with a piano teacher who lives on the estate,’ I reminded him.

‘And there was the low-born woman he ditched years back, when the title bobbed to the surface.’

‘Perhaps it’s Miss Currie who is to be elevated when Lord Buckie pops off,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps she’s waiting in Stirlingshire like a princess in a tower for her prince to come.’

‘Perhaps she killed the lot of them.’

‘Perhaps she was never a nurse and Laurie brought her in to see if she could polish them all off for him.’

It was rather like listening to my sons.

‘I have a serious point to make,’ I said, and then I regretted the way they instantly sobered, with twitching lips and brows pulled ostentatiously downwards – why does any pair of male creatures always gang up on and make ridiculous a solitary female who comes to join them? ‘This low-born female. The ordinary Miss as Hugh called her: what if it were Anastasia? What if Robin recognised her and she recognised him and that’s why she left the ring and that’s why he killed her?’

‘Why, exactly?’ said Alec. ‘I agree about the recognising. But why would she have to die?’

‘And didn’t she leave the ring because her pony threw a wobbler?’ said Hutchinson. I looked away from him. I had not, as yet, come clean about Donald and Teddy.

‘His “wobbler”, Inspector,’ said Alec valiantly, ‘could have been caused by her reaction to seeing Laurie. I mean surely he must have been even more attuned than an ordinary pony to her every twitch and shudder, and I remember being thrown off a very well-schooled mount once, just for sneezing.’

Inspector Hutchinson answered Alec although his eyes were trained on me.

‘Very nicely argued, sir,’ he said.

‘My sons were fibbing,’ I said, glad to have got it off my chest at long last. ‘Pa Cooke terrified them and they panicked.’

There was a long silence, during which the picture of Donald and Teddy in arrow-patterned suits, familiar from the Cinerama, pressed in on me.

‘Well, I did say I wasn’t in the business of collecting scalps,’ said the inspector at long last. ‘Good to have it straight in the end, though.’ I was blushing furiously and I busied myself with a non-existent problem in the area of my glove-buttons until the blush subsided. ‘But we all agree,’ he went on, ‘that it’s a country mile more likely he’d kill someone he knew than a complete stranger?’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but we need something more than his knowing the girl to serve as a motive proper.’

‘Well, having knowledge of women is very often at the root of things, madam,’ said Hutchinson, ‘I’ve seen it more times than I can tell you. Murder is hardly ever a damned thing to do with hate, if I might speak so plainly. Oh no. Love and money is what it comes down to. And drink. But this kind of murder that we’re looking at here? Love and money, mark my words.’

Then, like the barrels of a lock holding the safe door closed, all the pieces fell in together with a click.

‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘He married her. He married his ordinary Miss, when it looked as though there was no reason for him not to. His brother had heirs and successors coming out of his ears and Robin married his girlfriend without his brother’s approval or consent. Then…’

‘Then came the ’flu,’ said Alec, taking up the tale, ‘and down went the heirs, with Robin helping the last one on her way. Now everything was different. Now his brother’s blessing was make-or-break and such a marriage would have broken it to bits but it was too late. The deed was done. Then what?’

‘Then what?’ cried Hutchinson, so sharply that Alec swerved off the lane and we bumped along in a soft verge for an exciting moment until his wheels found the ash again. ‘Then his young wife, who saw him kill the niece, or maybe heard that he had, had a sensible think to herself and realised that she was next for the shove off the cliff top and she hooked it.’

‘To the circus?’

‘Maybe that’s where he found her in the first place,’ I said. ‘That would explain why he’d be so sure his brother wouldn’t accept the creature.’

‘And he’s been looking for her ever since?’ said Alec. ‘Scouring every show in the land?’

‘Trying to find her and persuade her into a divorce – let’s give him the benefit, eh? – or find her and do away with her before his brother hears about it. If his brother dies and she comes out of the woodwork there’d be an almighty scandal.’

‘But would Robin care about a scandal?’ I said.

‘Maybe what’s worrying him is that she would hold the drowned niece over his head and take him for his last penny,’ said Alec.

‘And you know what it does help us with, all of this?’ said the inspector. ‘It explains why he would sneak out right there and then and bash her head in on the ground. No time to lose, see? His brother was sinking. Hang the consequences if it all went wrong.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time he’d leapt into action,’ said Alec. ‘I mean, we don’t think he dragged his niece to the cliff top and threw her over, do we? We think she set out to kill herself and he helped. Or he happened to find her at the edge of the cliff and gave her a timely shove.’

‘Oh, don’t say it like that,’ I begged him. ‘Don’t let’s speculate at all. Nurse Currie is going to tell us the worst soon enough.’

It was dark before we reached Stirling, the three of us gaunt with exhaustion – Alec actually asleep – although Inspector Hutchinson was revelling in his turn at the wheel.

‘I learned to drive in a Vauxhall,’ he said, polishing a portion of the woodwork with his coat sleeve, and not for the first time. ‘An old Prince Henry and I always say, if it was good enough for His Majesty it’s good enough for me. Now, madam, what’s that address you’ve got there? What are we looking for?’

By the light of Alec’s electric torch I could just make out Mrs Mallen’s laborious pencilled printing, but we had to stop and ask for directions from a newspaperman on a street corner who came out of his kiosk to peer into the car at the lady and gentleman who some copper was taking to the baby hospital. What was the story here, then, his face seemed to say as he told us the way.

‘No better than you should be,’ said Hutchinson when he climbed back in and we set off again, ‘that’s what he’s decided, madam. He’ll be telling that tale till closing time.’

The practised eye of the nurse who answered the bell at Campsie Grange was not taken in for a second, though. Even in my bulky Persian lamb I presented an outline far too svelte for a customer and she was at a loss. When Inspector Hutchinson introduced himself and showed his card with his policeman’s number, however, her look of fascination knocked that of the newspaper seller’s for an effortless six.

‘If you could fetch Nurse Currie then, miss?’ said Hutchinson. ‘And if you could just say she has a visitor, please? I don’t want her alarmed. Now, is there a sitting room or some such where we could speak to her?’

There was rather a splendid nurses’ sitting room, in fact, out of which three off-duty girls in curlpapers and knitted slippers were unceremoniously bundled to make way for us.

‘Well, go and sit in the doctor’s room,’ hissed our guide. ‘There’s nobody in there tonight.’ To further grumbling we heard an exasperated ‘Well, light it then. It’ll soon warm up. Or fill a bottle. Now, let me go and get Susan for these… people.’

Feeling rather guilty, Alec and I tucked ourselves on to a sofa by the fire, which had been burning all day and was a pulsating heap of orange, delicious after the endless drive. The inspector strode about the room, whistling, flipping through picture papers lying on the desk and even, I was rather shocked to see, poking his pen into a pile of letters and reading the names on the envelopes. Then quickly, as the door opened, he turned.

Nurse Currie was a woman of forty, small and with a mass of dark curls which hugged her white cap and tumbled over her forehead, despite attempts at the back to tame them with pins and netting. She had the bloom that most girls have in their youth but only the very lucky or very healthy retain throughout their middle years, pink lips, pink cheeks, clear eyes and a softness of skin one usually associates with woodcutters’ wives who live in clearings in the forest, rather than working nurses in the middle of their shift. Surely they should look either wan or ruddy from toil? For a moment, Alec’s idea of Nurse Currie as Robin’s abandoned Miss reared its head again.

‘Can I help you?’ she said, sitting down very neatly in a small chair just inside the door. I supposed nurses must need to work up a neat way of sitting, for what could be more unseemly than a birth-room, or indeed a deathbed, sprawl?

Inspector Hutchinson introduced himself and the two of us to her and she looked puzzled, as how could she not, but her wide eyes showed no scheming; there was no leap of guilt or flare of fear.

‘We would like to talk to you about a young lady you nursed a few years ago,’ Hutchinson began. ‘A Miss Ambrosine Laurie.’

‘Lady Ambrosine Buckie,’ I corrected.

‘Aye, right,’ said the inspector. ‘No one like the aristocracy for collecting names. Outside of the circus, anyway.’

‘I’m sure, Nurse Currie,’ I said, ‘that even in the course of a long career, you will remember this case.’

She nodded, pursing her mouth slightly. ‘Robert, Thomas, Charlotte, little Victoria, then Her Ladyship, until there was only Amber left. That’s what the family called her, madam – Amber – and I did the same.’

‘Yes, well, it’s Lady Amber that we need to ask you about most particularly,’ said Hutchinson. ‘It’s recently come to my attention that you might know more about her death than almost anyone.’

Now Nurse Currie’s eyes did just cloud over slightly and she bowed her head before she spoke again.

‘It’s a thing I’ve never done before or since,’ she said, ‘and you’ll just have to take my word for it. You’ve been speaking to that Mrs Wilson, haven’t you?’

Inspector Hutchinson nodded.

‘Well, there’s proof of it,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be her you’d got it from because I’ve never told another living soul. The things I’ve heard in sickrooms and I’ve been twenty-two years nursing this Easter. That was the only time I talked and I had to, sir. Had to.’ She spoke with great emphasis. ‘Because I didn’t know what to do for the best and it would have pressed on me like a knife if I’d tried to ignore it.’

‘You didn’t know what to do for the best?’ echoed the inspector. ‘Where was the puzzle? If there’s been a crime, you report it. That’s what’s best, every time.’

‘But I’m not sure that it was a crime,’ she said, the anguish beginning to sound in her voice. ‘That’s what I couldn’t decide. And Mrs Wilson told me the best thing to do was just try to forget about it and not let it eat away at me.’

‘I’ll bet she did!’ said Alec, grimly.

‘But what was there to decide?’ I said. ‘Robin Laurie drowned his niece. Isn’t that so? Whether he threw her into the water or held her under or even just stood on the cliff and did nothing. He killed her. Ina Wilson told us that.’

‘No,’ said Nurse Currie, ‘that’s not what happened at all and it’s not what I said. Mrs Wilson is misremembering, or at least maybe she never understood properly in the first place. She was ill, weak, and she only let me say it once then she just insisted that we both forget it and never mention it again.’

‘That sounds about right,’ Alec said.

‘So what did happen?’ said Hutchinson.

‘Amber didn’t catch the ’flu that winter, not like all the others did,’ Nurse Currie began. ‘She was just her own same self, playing her games and telling her wild tales – she was a girl like no other one I’ve ever seen; her father used to say she was a changeling.’ I nodded, encouraging. ‘But when her little brothers and little sisters died and then her mother that she loved so much, for they were the closest of families, unusual for people of that station in life-’ Here she stumbled over her words and coloured a little, realising her audience. ‘Well, anyway. She crumpled up. The sorriest thing you could ever hope to see. And when her mother was gone, Amber left a note and then she went too. I saw the note, sitting against her bedroom mirror – I was done with nursing by then, because there were no children left to nurse and half the maids were sick so I was helping. I was putting pressed linens away and I saw it. “To the finest father I could ever have hoped for,” it said on the envelope. I didn’t know where to put myself, what to do. I must have stood there for ten minutes together, just saying “Think, Susan, think” to myself but unable to move. When I finally came to again, I went round the grounds, round the gardens, the park, down to the beach, to her favourite little place where she played at palaces and pirate ships and crusaders – even though it was only a little shack really – and that’s where I saw him. He was looking for her too – her uncle was – and he had the letter in his hand. He came out of the shack and stood on the beach then he took a match from his pocket – I was hiding behind a tree watching him – he took a match from his pocket and he lit that letter on fire and dropped it on the sand.’

She stopped, her eyes straining at the effort of dragging the memory up and into the room for us. Inspector Hutchinson delved into an inside pocket and drew out a slim flask. He offered it to Nurse Currie but she only frowned at him, smoothed her uniform skirt over her knees and carried on.

‘I thought maybe he had read it and had thought it best his brother never saw what she’d written there. I just waited, scared to move in case he saw me, waited for him to leave the beach first, but then what did he do? He ran into the sea, clothes, boots and all, in he went. I was just going to run out and go after him, try to call to him, tell him not to do it, when he turned and came out on his own. Then off he went, up to the house, and that night they told the staff. Told all of us. Amber had drowned. Amber was gone and even her uncle hadn’t managed to save her.’

She could not have asked for a more rapt audience than the three of us; we sat like stone, each of us thinking.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Nurse Currie said. ‘If her letter had told her poor daddy that she was running off and leaving him, then her uncle did a kind thing, didn’t he? But would it be better for His Lordship to have hope and a reason to search for her?’

‘But why are you so sure she ran off?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you believe she really did jump into the sea? A note can just as easily mean suicide as it can a runaway and you say yourself you didn’t read it.’

Nurse Currie nodded. ‘But she just wouldn’t, madam, you’d have to have known her. She was as lively as ten monkeys; she’d have rallied again and been back to all her daft ways. Joan of Arc with her sword, Marie Antoinette in her tower, Empress Anastasia hiding in the palace till the murdering rascals were gone. That was her favourite game of all.’

‘Anastasia!’ said the inspector, sitting back so suddenly that the word was forced out of him in a rush.

‘See, that’s how I knew she’d not kill herself just because her mother and all the little ones were gone. She had played that game with me, in the very sickroom, if you believe it. She told me that Anastasia was strong and she had fought for her life and not lain down and died with the others. “That’s the kind of girl I want to be, Nurse Susan,” she said to me. “I’m going to have adventures and be thrilling and people will clap and cheer when they see me.” How could that girl have thrown herself into the sea?’

‘But how did she get away?’ said Alec. ‘It’s miles from Cullen to anywhere.’

Nurse Currie was going to answer, but I got in before her.

‘She took her pony,’ I said.