After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Nine

We could be sure of one thing: there was nothing more to be learned in Galloway. Clearly the Duffys had chosen the spot because they could go about their business unobserved there. So I telephoned to Gilverton, telling Hugh with a nice truthfulness that the Duffys had gone off to the mountains and that I should like Drysdale to fetch me from Edinburgh the following afternoon. I was glad; despite a growing fondness for the peace of my little room with its striped flannel sheets and its view of the barrels in the yard, my lack of success with the locals (around whom Alec seemed able to run the expected rings) was a constant thorn, and I was missing Bunty, growing tired of the clothes I had brought and, after this morning, I needed Grant to attend to my coat and gloves as a matter of urgency.

We spent the journey up to town dividing the tasks ahead. I was to tackle the jeweller who identified the pastes, since both Alec and I felt a lady could best achieve the right combination of tenacious interest and muddle-headedness to find out all there was to know while not putting the man on his guard. Besides, the jewels were my proper concern, being Daisy’s only one. I thought it rather unlikely that Cara would have said anything useful to a jeweller, but thoroughness is to be recommended in most arenas and, also, there was not much else for me to do.

Alec had rather wider scope. Under cover of unbearable grief, he was to make visits to Cara’s closest friends and beg them to talk about her. We both thought it certain that they would speak of the last time they had met, or the last letter they had had, and that something about the pickle she was in might be revealed. I secretly hoped, as I daresay did he, that he should actually discover much more than this; that is, that he should discover Cara herself holed up with a chum somewhere. We did not, however, give voice to this hope.

So, after a blissful night back in my own bed and having submitted myself to one of Grant’s most punitive toilettes – it always incensed her to have me go off on my own – I found myself in Edinburgh again, descending Frederick Street, approaching the jeweller’s with the reluctance of a dog being led to its bath water. Stopping at the corner of the street and pretending to look with interest at a suite of hideous mahogany bedroom furniture in the window of a shop, I ran through my plan once again. I hoped this plan was a wily testament to my growing skills as a detective, but I feared it was another rag-bag of unnecessary lies and pointless indiscretions. Briefly, it was this: I had decided to tell the jeweller that I suspected suicide and was convinced that Cara’s attempt to sell the jewels was connected. I should ask him not to tell the Duffys about my interest, and I felt sure that out of common decency, even if not out of any sense of obligation, he would agree. I should begin calmly but was ready to dissolve into tears if the occasion arose and a corner of my handkerchief was soaked in Thawpit to help with the dissolving.

An hour later I was striding out along the pavement again, with my head high and a bounce in my step like the first day of spring and I had swung around the corner past the mahogany furniture and begun the uphill climb before I began to falter. It was true that I had performed brilliantly. The jeweller was flattered by my confidences and only too eager to discuss every detail of his meeting with Miss Duffy. He hoped to be struck dead if he breathed a word of such a distressing thought to her family or anyone else and (my final triumph) he made a cup of tea and put my feet up on a stool when I broke down and ‘despite dabbing my eyes’ succumbed to a fit of weeping. However, the thought struck me only now that my visit had in fact been a complete failure. Put simply, I had not found anything out. Miss Duffy had said nothing at all about her reasons for selling up, and remarkably little about the jeweller’s discovery of the fakes. She had seemed neither very surprised nor suspiciously unsurprised but only rather distant, as though unconcerned in the transaction. This, he had assured me, was not uncommon. Ladies selling their jewels often masked the unpleasant feelings it aroused with haughty remoteness. She had not even reacted when told that, had the jewels been genuine, she would have needed to produce proof of ownership before a sale could go through, but the jeweller considered that this might be put down to, as he called it, breeding.

I was forced to stop at the kerb on George Street while a number of taxis passed and, glancing along, I saw a willowy figure dressed in black emerge from a shop on the other side, followed by another, bulkier, outline in deeper and yet more garish mourning. The second was undoubtedly an upper servant of some description but the first, now walking in my direction, was Clemence Duffy. I scuttled across between taxis and, composing my face into friendly sympathy, approached them.

‘Darling,’ I exclaimed, attempting to press Clemence to me, maternally. ‘What happened to the Lake District? Is your mother better? Not worse, I hope. Not too ill to travel?’ Clemence, after recovering from her initial surprise at seeing me and, I expect, at being clasped so inexpertly to my bosom, looked rather pleased, or as pleased as her unanimated face ever did.

‘Mummy and Daddy are still at Grasmere but I came home to pack for Lucerne.’

‘You’re alone?’

‘No,’ she said, waving vaguely behind her. ‘Nanny’s here.’ I nodded towards the elderly servant who hovered nearby clutching a bulky parcel done up in brown paper. ‘I’m to go through Cara’s things before Mummy comes home, and then there are such a lot of letters to be answered.’ I was still puzzled. It was authentic enough that Mrs Duffy might not be up to this, but it looked very odd to leave Clemence to deal with what would have been such upsetting tasks. Even while this fresh evidence that Cara was not really dead cheered me, I suffered exasperation that their act was so unconvincing.

‘Besides,’ Clemence continued, ‘there was something else I particularly wanted to attend to.’ She patted the parcel in Nanny’s arms and then, struck by a thought, she turned back to me with her sleepy, beatific smile. ‘Would you care to join me for luncheon, Dandy? And see it first? It will have to be at home, I’m afraid, because of the mourning, but you’re very welcome.’

We lunched off boiled chicken and asparagus jelly against a background of studied gloom in the dining room at Drummond Place, the shades being half-pulled, the room unadorned by any flowers, and the maid who served us red-eyed and sniffing. The servants at any rate were responding suitably to what they believed about Cara’s death, however bogus the family might appear to my over-informed eye. Afterwards, we carried coffee upstairs to a sitting room which, being at the back of the house, was allowed its full measure of sunlight. It was hardly more comfortable for that, however, being antiseptically modern. The white floor shone like glass, making one fearful to walk upon it too heavily, and it was hard to believe that one might sit on one piece of the gleaming white furniture and put down a coffee cup on another, so like sculpture and so unlike chairs and tables did they seem.

Clemence caught me gaping and said: ‘Mummy just had it done. Isn’t it delightful?’

I thought it looked silly against the Georgian windows and under the Georgian cornice, but could hardly say so. Luckily, Clemence turned from me and pounced on the brown paper parcel laid on a white cube of a table before the Georgian fireplace and began to pull off the wrapping.

It was a large black leather book, wider than it was long, its covers held shut by a ribbon. Untying this and flicking aside a sheet of tissue paper, she pushed it towards me and I saw it was a photograph album. The first photograph was of Cara. I caught my lip in my teeth to stifle a gasp; it was so beautiful, so light and soft-looking, quite unlike the usual snaps in which moon-faced freaks barely recognizable as one’s relations sit propped up like corpses. In this photograph, Cara, close up, only her head and shoulders showing, was standing in a room posed very casually with one elbow leaning on a chimneypiece, and although she was evidently facing the window (for I could see it reflected in the glass above the fireplace behind her) something to do with the light bouncing from behind as well as in front gave her an intensified version of that back-to-the-window glow every woman tries to arrange whenever she can. It was not just the light, though. Cara’s expression, too, was like a distillation of all that was so charming about her. She had her face half-turned away as though shy and was smiling the curling smile I remembered, but with such a serenity that, forgetting for a moment that she was still alive, I felt a lump form in my throat.

‘Look,’ said Clemence, turning the stiff page, ‘they’re not all of her.’ She showed me pictures of Mrs Duffy and of Clemence herself in the same room, sitting in plump armchairs or standing against the windows, sprigged cotton curtains billowing around them.

‘These are heavenly, Clemence,’ I said, turning to the next, which had Mrs Duffy and Clemence sitting at a garden table with teacups. With a jolt, I recognized the shingle path and the white fence in the background and realized that this was the beach cottage. Quite a substantial structure, I saw, almost to the point that calling it a cottage was an affectation, and I thought again about the way it had been reduced to such a small pile of ash. My detective instinct prompted a question.

‘Did someone from the photographer’s shop come down for a visit, then?’ I thought that such an individual would surely have something to tell me, and felt a surge of excitement to think of him five minutes’ walk away in George Street. Alec would be astounded.

‘No,’ said Clemence. ‘These are mine. I mean, I took them.’

‘Well, they’re splendid,’ I said. ‘People usually look like propped-up… dolls, don’t they? But these are lovely.’ Clemence’s face does not pucker into easy frowns any more than it breaks into grins, but something did happen in her expression then.

‘I hope Mummy doesn’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only I went to such trouble.’

‘Of course she won’t mind, Clemence dear. She will be delighted. What luck that you should have taken them. And what extraordinary luck that they should not have been lost in the fire too.’

We were both silent for a moment considering this. Then Clemence blinked and her next words came in the quiet, careful voice she had used in the court.

‘I carry all my plates together in a special case – the fresh ones and the ones I’ve used – so naturally I had them with me on our walk.’

‘Naturally,’ I agreed.

Her face smoothed again. ‘I took the plates into Rollins’ when I got home,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t ask them to hurry or anything, so imagine how touching when they telephoned this morning to say they had made them up already. They must have done it because of Cara, don’t you think? They must have heard.’

‘People are sometimes too extraordinarily kind,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Clemence. ‘Only it’s not – I just hope Mummy isn’t angry.’

I could see how one might as easily think it ghoulish as touching, but I gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile, and went back to the topic of the photographs.

‘How did you take the ones with you in them?’ I asked, examining the picture of the garden more closely. Photographic tricks held no interest for me, but I thought a good run on her hobby horse would put Clemence back at her ease. However, when she spoke she sounded strained, starting the speech with a strangulated little laugh.

‘Oh, Cara took that one. She wasn’t very good at it. Look, you can see this is not as clear as some of the others.’ I could indeed. This was much closer to Hugh’s efforts with his Box Brownie, nothing like as beautiful as the picture of Cara in the house. Clemence cleared her throat. ‘She got very cross with me,’ she said, ‘when I tried to explain what she was doing wrong. I suppose I must have been lecturing. One does, doesn’t one, when it’s one’s passion. And then she flounced off. Look.’

The next picture was of the same scene with Cara disappearing into the french windows and Mrs Duffy caught between her camera smile and the expression of annoyance which was just about to replace it.

‘I didn’t really mean for this one to be in the album,’ she said, ‘since we were quarrelling.’

‘Oh, but such a little quarrel,’ I said, meaning it, thinking that this could not possibly be the quarrel of which Agnes Marshall had spoken. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile these touching pictures with the kind of quarrel Mrs Marshall had felt was going on. Perhaps she was a scandal-monger after all in her own small way.

‘Yes,’ said Clemence, still rather brittle. ‘And we made it up beautifully anyway. A man came past walking his dog – hideous little thing – and I asked him if he would take a snap of all three of us together, but he was hopeless! I tried everything except writing it all down for him. After he had wasted three plates we gave up, and by that time Cara had such giggles that she had forgiven me.’ She stopped tittering and sighed. ‘Of course if I had known that it was our very last chance, I should have persevered with the silly man.’ With that, she turned another smile on me, stretched lips and watchful eyes above. Before I was forced to think up something to say, however, we heard the muffled peal of the front doorbell which was clearly bound up in rags for mourning, and Clemence leapt to her feet.

‘Telegrams, she said. ‘Such heaps of telegrams and letters every day. I had better deal with them, if you’ll excuse me, Dandy. The parlour maid was in floods yesterday and forgot to tip the boy.’

‘Can’t your butler -?’ I began, thinking that the paragon of propriety who had admitted me on my first visit would not stand for the young mistress out on the step tipping the telegram boy.

‘He’s not fit to be seen, I’m afraid,’ said Clemence. ‘Drunk. He adored Cara.’ Her voice was cold, although whether from jealousy or from disapproval of the butler’s collapse I could not say.

‘We all did,’ I said, and then grimaced at my own sugariness. ‘She was -'

‘You hardly knew her,’ said Clemence, startling me with her vehemence, but as I peered into her face to see what she could possibly mean by such a thing, the shutters came down, the bell clanked again, and she left.

This was getting stranger and stranger by the minute. I did not recognize, and nor would anyone who had known Mama and the girls for more than a week, the joyous rustic trinity in these photographs. But there it all was, incontrovertible, interleaved with tissue and bound in leather for all to see. Unless, I thought. Unless… Of course! This was part of the cover-up. For after all, was this record of a perfectly ordinary week in the country not somewhat too complete to be believed? Was it not, in fact, a deliberate attempt to construct a fairy tale, told in pretty pictures, of a happy family and especially a happy Cara? And when one thought about it, really, the angelic beam of Cara in that close-up was rather an over-egged pudding. Even some of Clemence’s oddness began to make sense. The album had clearly been planned to dispel any suspicions of suicide. These suspicions had not arisen in the end (except in Alec and me) but Clemence was too proud of her own cleverness to resist showing off to someone. Hence my very warm welcome and invitation for luncheon at a time when one might more naturally have expected her to be shunning all company.

They had all the practical details very much off pat, I thought. But they just did not quite get the emotions right. Either too little, as when Alec and I first came upon them in the parlour at the Murray Arms, or too much as when Mrs Duffy suddenly took to her bed or languished in Grasmere sending her now only daughter home alone. And Clemence today was making the same hash of it: more interested in how her plates had turned out than in the face of her dead sister, and then brusque to the point of rudeness trying to amend things.

I perused the photographs again, this time somewhere between cynicism and a grudging admiration for how it had all been managed. Clemence really was an excellent photographer, and quite an actress besides. The little sisterly quarrel was a nice touch, as was the bumbling man with the dog. I wondered if he was real. Might it be worth going back down to Galloway, or sending Alec, to seek him out? Probably not, since whatever he had to tell us would not answer any of the big questions such as where Cara might have gone. Or where the diamonds had gone for that matter.

Thinking of the diamonds suddenly made me remember Silas and Daisy with a guilty start – I was disgusted with the way I kept forgetting about Silas and Daisy – but with them now in mind, I began to feel less generously disposed to these photographs. And their artistic merit did not actually bear repeated examination, I found, excepting perhaps the one of Cara posed inside the cottage. And something about that was beginning to bother me.

I turned back to the start to look through the whole collection again with an objective eye. There was another of Cara which I now saw for the first time. Another in the same pale dress, but this time leaning, laughing, over a wooden fretwork banister in a painted staircase, her hem drooped to her feet by her stoop, her hair ruffled out of smoothness and glowing as the sun shone through it from the elegant sash window on the landing behind her. In this picture she looked, quite simply, like an angel. A bobbed and shingled angel in a crêpe-de-Chine frock and comfortable shoes, to be sure, but again my conviction of her safety wavered.

I was still gazing at the angel-on-the stairs picture, when Clemence came back into the room and I saw a flare of something on her face as she caught sight of me bent studiously over the album. Aha! I thought. You didn’t mean to leave me alone with this for quite that long, did you?

‘This one is simply divine,’ I said, and showed her. I expected some kind of reaction, naturally, but not what came. She winced and then to get control of herself she made a sudden gesture which drew the corners of her mouth down and made the tendons of her neck leap out briefly. I tried to behave as though I had not seen this curiously unsettling little show but at the same time I tried to fix everything about it in my mind to pore over later.

‘You know, Clemence dear,’ I said, ‘you are very talented. I should love to see what you would be capable of in a studio if these snaps are anything to go by. Have you ever thought of it?’ Having thus praised her, I thought, into malleability, I went on: ‘And how about making another copy of this album for Alec Osborne? He would be utterly – well, I daresay enchanted is not quite the right word, is it? But I think it’s an idea you should consider.’ What I wanted, of course, was a copy I could study at leisure and I thought I could chance laying it on a bit thick; the worst that could come would be that she would think me a dreadful Victorian and this she probably did already. ‘After all they were engaged, and it would be a great shame if she just slipped out of his life completely. Even if it is too painful for him to look through just now, it would be something for him to treasure in years to come.’

Clemence stared at me, chewing her lip, and I thought I could imagine at least some of the conflict that fluttered inside her. She could not think of a single good reason why she should not make an album for Alec, but she could not agree to something so far outside her mother’s plan without at least asking Mrs Duffy first. And although she was sure that Mama’s answer would be the firmest possible ‘no’, Clemence’s own pride in her pictures made her want to say ‘yes’. Despairing of her ever answering, I took pity and said goodbye.

Alec was staying at the George. We had planned to meet there for luncheon if our allotted jobs were finished on time and for tea if not, but since I left Clemence at a quarter past two I could not be quite sure which it was to be. Luncheon at the George does not have quite the ring of sobriety and respectability that ‘tea at the George’ evokes. Tea at the George goes along in the imagination with pantomimes, stiff taffeta petticoats and the smell of mothballs from Nanny’s best winter coat and so I was torn between a desire to share my morning’s gleanings as soon as I could and a desire to be too late, so that it was tea blameless tea that we shared. I supposed, irrationally, that our lunching together would bring Renée Gordon-Strathmurdle to town, to the George, and to the adjoining table as though on a pulley. And what if it did? Luncheon was hardly breakfast in bed. The only explanation for these twinges of conscience was that spying and snooping on those who thought me their friend – and doing it for a fee! – was interfering with my judgement regarding all kinds of innocence and guilt.

Confirming, as always, that the world operates quite independent of my desires, the waiter assured me that ‘my party’ was still there and led me to a quiet table at the back of the dining room where Alec sat, not quite concealed behind a parlour palm, but with that general idea.

‘I’ve lunched already,’ I said as I sat, waving away a menu. Then I turned to Alec. ‘And I’ll bet you can’t guess where?’

‘Two mugs of soup in the back shop of the jeweller’s?’ said Alec, playing along. He could see that I was bubbling over with something.

‘Tell me yours first,’ I said firmly, determined that my meeting with Clemence should be the finale.

Alec had made no progress at all.

‘I dined at Posso last night,’ he began. ‘Dalrymple’s place, you know, down in the Borders, but Chrissie Dalrymple had nothing to offer. She hasn’t seen or spoken to Cara since Christmastime. A little coolness, I imagine, arising from not being asked to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Well, what does she expect?’ I said. Chrissie Dalrymple towered over Cara and was stones heavier, with a round pink face and bright yellow hair that stood out all around like a thatched roof. I should not have wanted her in my wedding photographs either.

‘Yes,’ said Alec, clearly not following. ‘They were school friends, though, and as thick as thieves, united in their dislike of Clemence, Cara always said. Clemence was just a year above and fearfully haughty as a result, I gather. Anyway, I had thought if Cara had anything she didn’t want to get around her current set, but which was pressing too heavily on her to be kept quite secret, an old school friend would be just the thing. As it was, I achieved nothing except indigestion from too much high game and sympathy.’

I could well imagine. Chrissie Dalrymple would have been cock-a-hoop to have Alec, newly eligible, descend.

‘She told me not to feel that I had to answer her letter of condolence when it arrived, if I preferred instead to come back to Posso and chat again in person.’ Alec spoke with the bleak panic of a man accidentally drifting closer than he cares to towards a girl of greater determination and less politeness than himself. I tried to hide my smile as I answered.

‘That’s a thought, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Letters of condolence? I mean, one always is quite desperate for something different to say, isn’t one? And the last conversation one had with the – in this case temporarily – departed would be a natural source of material.’

Alec summoned a waiter and asked if any letters had arrived for him during the morning.

‘Of course, my mother might not be sending them on at all,’ he said. ‘I might have them to look forward to whenever I go back to Dorset. Anyway, while we’re waiting – this morning I had coffee with three very good friends of Cara’s whom I have met upwards of half a dozen times but whom I still think of interchangeably as Boo, Koo and Shoo. Do you know who I mean?’

‘Booty, Koo and Sha-Sha,’ I said, laughing again. ‘Yes, I know them very well, but how spine-chilling for you, darling.’ Alec nodded fervently.

‘I had thought that grief might have tempered them somewhat, and they are very shaken, but all it meant was that they were even more inclined to throw their arms around me and each other and had lost all sense of conversational restraint. If I hadn’t known she was going riding afterwards, I should have said the tall, dark one was drunk.’ The waiter, approaching with a large stack of letters, caught this most unfortunate snippet, and put them down on the tablecloth with rather a smack.

‘Good old Mother,’ said Alec. ‘I paid extremely close attention to their outpourings, Boo-boo and Co-co I mean, and was on the lookout for any sign that one might have something to say to me she might not want the others to hear, but I’m fairly certain there’s nothing. I went as near as I dared to asking. So, neither Cara’s oldest chum nor any of the current gang seem to suspect a thing.’

He picked up the pile of letters and began to leaf through them absently, then suddenly stopped and sat very upright staring at one of the envelopes. He let the others fall to the table and held this one up in front of his face.

‘It’s from Cara,’ he said and turned it towards me. There was his name and address written in the same, rather faint, rather loopy hand, familiar now from the two letters we had both pored over at the gallery and again in Gatehouse. Without another word, Alec slit open the seal with a table knife and began to read out loud.

‘“Dear Alec, I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am.”’ He gave a high-pitched exhalation of breath that was almost laughter. ‘Dated the day before yesterday,’ he said, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.

‘“I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am,”’ he read again. ‘“I am almost too shocked and bewildered to know how to write this letter and I hope you will forgive me if I am clumsy as a result. Your suffering is without a doubt fathoms deeper than mine, but believe me when I say that I loved Cara… enough… to understand -”’ He broke off and stared at the letter, frowning. ‘“I loved Cara enough to understand what you must be feeling in these first days of your loss and grief.”’ He turned the letter over and looked at the back of the last sheet. ‘“With my deepest sympathy, Christine Dalrymple.”’

I hied the waiter and demanded that some brandy be brought. Alec’s face was the colour of gutter snow under his freckles, and his hand scrabbled around his lapel for several seconds before he managed to extract Cara’s two letters from his pocket and shove them towards me.

It was remarkable, so much so that I considered for a moment whether Chrissie’s letter of condolence might be from Cara after all and be in some kind of code. A further moment’s examination, however, showed me that only the handwriting was identical, the brains behind the two had little in common. Were Chrissie Dalrymple ever in a position to break off an engagement the recipient would be lucky to get away with fewer than ten pages.

The brandy, to which the waiter had added a measure of port off his own bat, quickly brought Alec back to a more usual colour. He shook his head over the letters again and again, and I had cause once more to wonder about his feelings for Cara and also whether he believed in his heart that she was safe, for all the conviction that logic had put in his head.

‘But it’s not really so peculiar,’ I said. ‘Girls’ schools are notorious for jamming one and all into the same mould. Well, no more than boys’ schools I daresay. In fact, you know, my own boys are much more like each other after three terms at school together than when they were just two brothers. Last hols Hugh had occasion to slipper them both for -’ I broke off, confused. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘This can hardly be of any interest.’

‘Tell me,’ said Alec. ‘Tales from the nursery are just what I need for a minute while I try to stop shaking.’ I went on reluctantly, tales from the nursery not being what I liked to think of as my forte.

‘Donald had gone off shooting rabbits after being expressly forbidden to do so, since there was a real shoot that day with several inexperienced guns and we didn’t want the boys getting peppered. Well, they were suspiciously quiet all morning but when Hugh bellowed up the nursery stairs demanding to know if they were there, they answered one after the other that yes they were but they were in a ticklish spot with a recalcitrant engine and couldn’t come down. Imagine our surprise, then, an hour later when Donald arrived in a neighbour’s motor car wrapped in a blanket, having fallen in the burn trying to get home without being seen. Little Teddy had answered for both, you see. “What is it, Daddy, we’re dashed busy.” And then “Yes, Dad, we’re almost there with this blasted engine. Must we come down?”

‘This wouldn’t have been possible before they went off to school. One spoke like Hugh and one spoke like his hero Angus, the cook’s son. Now they both just sound like schoolboys, like every schoolboy, as though they were turned out of a press in the dormitory at the beginning of their first term to be fostered on us.’

Alec looked quite calm again now, even managed a laugh, and I thought it was safe to turn the talk to my eventful morning. The failure of the visit to the jeweller was dealt with first and then I settled with some relish to what came after. I told him, without editorializing in the least, about Clemence being at home with Nanny to ‘take care of things’, and my puzzlement got its corroboration from his.

‘However,’ I said, ‘all that is nothing.’ I hunched forward over the table on my elbows and told him all about the photograph album, my idea about its original purpose, my disquiet about its contents and Clemence’s start of alarm at finding me poring over it.

‘You’re quite right,’ said Alec. ‘There is a strong smell of fish here.’

‘And,’ I said, becoming more sure with the warmth of his agreement, ‘I can’t help but wonder about such a painstaking record of what is ostensibly a very ordinary week in the country en famille. And then the chumminess in the pictures – it’s absolutely at odds with what we’ve heard about the frosty atmosphere.’

‘But what exactly have we heard about the atmosphere?’ said Alec. ‘Remind me what you were told.’

I cast my mind back over the Mrs Marshalls’ accounts and came to a rueful conclusion that I had made a great deal out of very little, merely that Cara and Clemence seemed not to want to be companions to one another and that Clemence was grumpy. Even added to the strange decision to all but dispense with a housekeeper, it did not amount to much. I fell silent, disappointed.

‘But tell me some more about these feelings you had about the photographs,’ said Alec. ‘What did you think was wrong with them?’

‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Only that there was something off. Not just the fact of their existence; we agree on that. But something about the photographs themselves just wasn’t right.’

‘Say again what they were,’ said Alec. ‘As much as you can remember.’ To my surprise he got out a pencil and a pad of paper and poised himself to make notes.

‘Well, there were the two portraits of Cara in the crêpe-de-Chine fr -’ I broke off. ‘The two portraits taken inside the cottage, I mean. And some of Clemence and of Lena in the same room, although these were not portraits exactly, more like snaps. So it’s almost as though they knew that the pictures of Cara were the ones that mattered and that’s not right, is it? Then there were some taken in the garden which were very pretty. Everyone under a tree in blossom with the french windows open to the house. Really very happy pictures, except that Cara got cross with Clemence for telling her what to do and flounced off, spoiling one. The only other I remember is of Lena and Cara on a cliff-top with their dresses blowing about in the wind. Clemence must have scrambled down and taken it from the beach, unless Lena and Cara climbed the cliff to have it taken. Oh, Alec, I don’t know. I need to have another look at them.’

‘Hmm. Hard to see how you could do that without making Clemence’s whiskers twitch,’ said Alec.

‘Which is exactly why I want you to pester her for a set of your own. Or at the very least you should take a good look at them to see if you can spot whatever it is that’s bothering me. As a man, you might alight on different aspects of…’ I fell silent, chasing a wisp of thought.

‘What?’ said Alec, but I shushed him.

‘Men and women, what was I thinking? Men and women… Oh!’ I sat up and slapped my hands down on the table. ‘I think I know what it is. Read me back exactly what you wrote down, Alec darling.’ He did so and before he was finished I interrupted him.

‘Yes, I’m sure I’m right. It’s the crêpe-de-Chine dress. They are supposed to be a record of a week in the country. A whole week. But don’t you see? Cara’s wearing the same crêpe-de-Chine afternoon frock in every one of them. And that’s not all.’ I stopped and stared down at the tablecloth trying to summon the pictures back before my eyes.

‘The picture on the cliff-top,’ I said. ‘The picture on the cliff-top has the sun behind them, that is, on the east, making it morning.’ The white cloth was dancing before my eyes, little purple and yellow spots blooming in it as I tried to concentrate. I shut my eyelids tight and thought furiously, trying to call to mind every detail.

‘Were you ever at the cottage?’ I asked. ‘I should love to know where the landing window sat in relation to the compass, because in the photograph with Cara looking over the banisters the sun is simply pouring in.’

Alec shook his head.

‘They’d only just got the place. This was their first visit to it.’

‘Well, Scottish architecture,’ I said. ‘Not exactly varied. I bet the staircase went up from the front and turned making the landing to the back and thus the landing window face east. Morning again, you see. And therefore extremely odd for Cara to be wearing a crêpe-de-Chine dress. That’s it. The pictures were all taken in one frantic session. Now, why should that be?’

Alec whistled softly and clapped his hands.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I should never have thought of that. But I wonder why they didn’t? Three ladies. Why didn’t they think to change their clothes?’

‘Perhaps they didn’t have time,’ I said, trying to remember if in fact all three ladies had been in the same clothes in all pictures. I only seemed to remember Cara, gleaming in her pale frock, and could not bring the others to mind.

‘Presumably,’ I went on, ‘they were trying to make a record of Cara’s presence throughout the week when in fact she was leaving in time to get far away before the fire, her “death”, and any investigation. What odds that if we managed to find the man with the dog who botched the picture of them all together, he’d tell us not only that it was morning but that it was the start of the week.’

‘I’ll bet that’s it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ll bet if you went back now, Dandy, and asked your Mrs Marshalls just when they saw Cara, they would tell you they saw a great deal of her at the very start of the visit and then not again. Shades of your little boys, don’t you think?’

‘But how can she have gone?’ I said, coming back down to earth with a thump. ‘Never mind why or where. How can she have got away without anyone seeing her? She had no car and there is no train station within miles and rather few buses, never mind that Cara travelling alone on the Gatehouse bus would have been pretty conspicuous to all the interested locals.’

‘Well, consider this,’ said Alec. ‘We ’ve been thinking that they went to Kirkandrews because it was a quiet spot to stage a fire, but what, when you get right down to it, is its main feature?’ I looked at him blankly, and he continued: ‘The sea, Dandy, it’s on the coast. And how better to get far away with the greatest possible discretion than in a boat?’

‘It’s all a bit Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ I said. ‘But I suppose you may be right. Although, if someone was coming to get Cara in a boat, then they might just as easily have come in a car. We hadn’t thought of her being fetched before. I wish I did have a good excuse to go back to Gatehouse and quiz the Mrs Marshalls.’ I was speaking idly.

‘And find the man with the dog and try to find out if someone saw a boat,’ said Alec, who clearly was not.

‘I think the local fishermen might be more in your line,’ I said, but Alec shook his head.

‘We can’t possibly both go again. You need a plausible motive for your return and I should only undermine it. Besides, I intend to cultivate Clemence and get a hold of those photographs by hook or by crook. I might just let slip to Kiki and Kuku that the album exists and let Clemence try to resist their attempts to winkle a copy out of her.’

I was rather hurt that Alec felt he needed to see them for himself, as though my conclusions could not be trusted, and my face must have shown some emotion, which he correctly interpreted.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said. ‘Don’t, please, be in any doubt about that, Dandy. But the time may be coming close when we find ourselves trying to convince someone that more official investigation is needed, and at that point we shall need some proof.’

‘So I’m off to Gatehouse again,’ I said. ‘What on earth am I going to tell Hugh this time?’

Alec had already stopped listening, I think, although he answered, after a fashion: ‘Say you’ve gone to see a man about a dog.’