After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Ten

After a long, fruitless attempt to think up something better, I did, in fact, in the end, tell Hugh that I had gone to see a man about a dog.

Clemence had described the one being walked by the man who tried to help them with their pictures as ‘a hideous little thing’ and for some reason I got it into my head that this meant a Jack Russell terrier. Assuming her to be as snobbish about dogs as most people are, I felt sure that any of the hideous breeds which happened to have some social cachet – bulldogs, King Charles spaniels, all the bulging of eye and bald of bottom – she would perceive with scrupulous correctness as adorable, but that a sweet little Jack Russell terrier would be an affront.

So I told Hugh in an innocent voice at breakfast, that whilst in Galloway I had met a man whose terrier bitch had recently been brought to bed and that I had resolved on going back to procure one of the puppies. Hugh looked rather pulled about by this. He has always despised what he calls my silliness about Bunty, not seeing why she should not sleep and be fed with his dogs, and the news was most welcome that I was considering another to dilute my adoration, and a terrier at that. On the other hand, there was the possibility that two dogs on cushions in my sitting room being fed chicken from two little china dishes might only be twice as annoying. I have to say I do not agree with Hugh’s assessment of my sentimentality over Bunty. She is simply my companion, as the hairy pack which follows him around is his, and since I spend my days inside in the comfort of my sitting room it is only common sense that she should be clean and sweet-breathed, while his dogs can with just as much common sense be reeking of carrion and caked in mud as he and they tramp around the woods and farms. Besides, Bunty is a Dalmatian and it is quite simply a waste of God’s considerable efforts to let a Dalmatian get dirty.

‘I thought you would approve,’ I said. ‘The breed as a whole and these puppies’ parents in particular are excellent molers.’ Hugh’s ears perked up at this. He is inordinately fond of his gardens, to the point of being quite peculiar at times, and we were suffering just then from a savage attack of moles, causing him acute pain each morning as he surveyed the desecration of yet more of the sward. Add to this the lamentable fact that a good mole-catcher is one thing the neighbourhood of Gilverton lacked (what mole-catchers there were being variously incompetent, lazy and, in one case, drunk by noon) and it is easy to see why a Jack Russell terrier from a talented moling lineage might be a very welcome addition to the household.

For one dreadful moment I thought I had gone too far and he was going to suggest he come with me but, thinking quickly, I put a stop to it.

‘I shall go in the motor car and take Grant with me this time,’ I said. ‘And Bunty, of course. There’s no use in bringing home a puppy she hasn’t met and might not take to.’ He disappeared behind his newspaper with a deep frown and one of those little harumphs he has begun to emit since he turned forty. Hugh is bored and pained by Grant’s and my conversations and would have been irritated beyond anything by the sight of my letting Bunty choose a puppy. I myself was quite looking forward to this bit, until I remembered that it was part of my cover story and was not actually going to happen.

Mrs McCall was delighted to see me again, all the more so since this time I was travelling as she obviously thought I should, with my maid and my chauffeur, and she took to Bunty immediately although not to the extent of letting her sleep in my bedroom; she treated this suggestion of mine as a joke.

Early the following morning I got Drysdale to drop me off at a convenient spot north of the patch of coast in question and arranged to be met again on the road to Borgue in two hours’ time. The morning was fresh and bright, a stiff sea breeze making me glad I had put a great deal of cream on my face but bringing no low cloud to threaten my walk. I had a snapshot of Cara, taken from Alec’s wallet, to jog memories and Bunty was straining to be off, plunging around with excitement and wagging her whole body from the shoulders backwards in delight.

‘That’s a grand-looking beastie,’ said a voice behind me, and I turned to see a young man in corduroys and a rather shabby mackintosh smiling at Bunty as he came towards us. ‘As they say in these parts,’ he went on. ‘What a beauty.’ He was not, after all, I saw as he drew nearer, a young man in the usual sense of the phrase, being rather creased about the eyes as well as the mackintosh, but ‘young man’ was his type in that he looked unburdened the way young men do, and utterly unmarried.

I looked about him for a dog of his own, thinking what luck it would be if this were the bumbling photographer already. There was no sign of one, but I tried my theory anyway.

‘Yes, she’s a dear,’ I said, falling into step with him as it seemed our paths both lay towards the beach. ‘Do you have a dog of your own? Only I’m on the hunt for someone around here – not sure who exactly – who has some Jack Russell puppies going begging.’ I stopped short, too late. I should never find an unknown man with a dog of some inelegant kind by making it a bitch, having it pregnant and dreaming up a breed for it all out of my own fluff-filled head. ‘Or so I heard. But I daresay the puppies are spoken for, if they even exist. Village gossip being what it is there’s a fair chance that some blameless little dog just happened to have a large meal of rabbit one day. Do you? Have a dog, I mean?’ I tried a light laugh, as though unaware of or at least unconcerned by the inanities I was spouting.

‘Cats,’ said the young man. ‘Cats for me every time, I’m afraid. Although this handsome creature gets close.’ With that he tipped his hat and disappeared into an opening in the hawthorn hedge which marked the start of a path.

‘Faint praise for you, Bunty,’ I muttered.

The walk along the cliff-tops was splendid although I made no further progress with the mystery man or his hideous little dog. None of the lounging youths or bustling old women I met was able to think of any such pair who walked along the coast, although I established that Sandy Marshall had a collie and that another branch of the seemingly endless Marshall family had a fearful mongrel; ‘mongrel’ excited me for a moment, since I could guess what Clemence would make of one, but it was clear from its description that it was far too big for the role. ‘Feet the size of your face, madam,’ said my informant, an image which made me hope I never encountered the thing. Eventually, I was persuaded by an aged worthy that I was wasting my time: ‘It could easily have been a tripper, a tourist, a visitor or even a hiker, madam, come to that.’ I agreed ruefully that it could be any one of these, whatever the differences were.

When the cliffs dipped into grassy hummocks, I scrambled down on to the beach, not wanting to walk through Kirkandrews and have to pass the burnt patch where the cottage used to be if I could help it. Presently, I identified the spot at which Clemence must have taken the photograph of Cara and Lena on the cliff-top; I remembered the jagged look of the rock, and that tortured little hawthorn clinging to the lower slopes had shown up clearly on the snap. One very interesting thing I noticed was that there was no easy path from the cliff just there, and so to set this picture up Clemence must have brought her camera and other accoutrements along the beach from the dip where I had joined it. Had she been photographing rock pools and happened to see her mother and sister above her, it might have made some sense, but trying to pass the scenario off as a plausible posed shot was ludicrous. I stood frowning up at the cliff, puzzled. Even once one knew what one knew, that is that the Duffys were constructing a record, it was still odd for part of that record to be this particular picture. What was gained by Clemence’s hauling her things along the shore and by Lena and Cara’s long wait at the top in that wind which whipped their clothes into a blur and must have chilled them? My imagined pretext, that Clemence was otherwise engaged and the others were caught impromptu, would only have gained merit if some of Clemence’s rock pool studies or whatever were in the album to support it. I wondered what she had done with them, then I shook my head to clear it – there were no rock pool studies. I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep a clear boundary between what I actually knew and what I surmised. Worse, conclusions based on my surmising threatened constantly to mix themselves in with known details and when that happened I should be lost.

On I trudged, leaving Bunty racketing about, snuffling in piles of damp seaweed and getting more and more excited by the unfamiliar slip and spray of sand under her paws. Each time I got further from her than she liked she gave a chorus of offended barks and raced to catch me up, overshooting and skidding to a halt in yet more of the enchanting sand and bladderwrack whereupon the whole performance started again. She was therefore quite exhausted by the time we had completed our loop, and she trotted quietly up the lane beside me, seeming – sand and scent apart – in a fit state to go visiting.

Still, I quailed at the thought of young Mrs Marshall’s reception – how I pitied Sandy, whom I had imbued with all of his mother’s good qualities – so I went straight to the old lady herself. From sitting slumped at the bench by her door after my labours I knew that she had a good view of the sea and I surmised that a cottager only has a bench by her door if it is her habit to sit there, so I felt some hope that she might be able to help me out in the matter of the boat, if indeed this romantic departure of Cara’s turned out to be true.

Old Mrs Marshall was ‘tickled’ to see me, as she put it, and took very readily to the unusually sedate Bunty, but she had no information to offer about any hideous little dog. What’s more she looked at me with piercing incredulity when I trotted out this excuse for my presence, and so for a while I sat quietly, looking out to sea – for we were indeed installed on the bench by her door – breathing in the scent of the new mint growing around our feet and enjoying the weak sunshine. I wished for a fishing boat or something to bob into view and help my next round of questions into being, but since nothing came I had to do what I could.

‘This is a very quiet spot,’ I said.

‘Aye, it is that,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘A tiny wee cottage in the middle of nowhere.’ I recognized the words I had used to Agnes and gave a snort of self-deprecating laughter, only blushing a little.

‘Yes, but I meant the sea, really. One expects there to be little boats and ferries and things and yet look at it – nothing. Is it always like that?’

‘The boats are out there right enough, off at six this morning and back at six tonight, if they’re spared.’

‘And are there ever pleasure boats?’ I asked. ‘Sailing boats? Is there anywhere for them to land hereabouts?’

‘Come the summer,’ said Mrs Marshall.

I paused again, planning my next enquiry, when she took me by surprise, saying: ‘Why don’t you just out and ask, madam, whatever it is?’ I looked at her from the corner of my eye and saw that although the twinkle was as ready as ever her face was serious, so I took a deep breath and decided to trust her and my instincts about her. I ignored the nagging voice in my head totting up the growing column of people I had either told outright about my theories or told such nonsense that they must suspect something worse.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘and I am not alone, either – I firmly believe that the fire at the cottage was deliberate, but -’ I held up my hand as she started to babble – ‘but that no one died in it. We, Miss Duffy’s fiance and myself, both strongly suspect that Cara left the cottage long before the fire, and this is where I hope you can help me.’

‘Who would do sich a thing?’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘There’s never been anything like that here in all my days. I mind of a boy in Kirkcudbright years back but he went into a home.’ I saw that I should have to explain some more, but I did not even get to finish the first sentence before Mrs Marshall’s remonstrances broke out again.

‘Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,’ she said, shaking her apron smooth and glaring at me as though I was one of her own many children with a hole in its stocking for her to darn. ‘What for why would a woman do sich a thing? After getting the whole place newly painted and papered not a month before. It makes no sense.’

This, it was true, did make no sense that Alec and I had yet established. Why had Mrs Duffy had the cottage decorated when she meant to burn it down?

‘Unless it was to guard against these very suspicions,’ I said. ‘Because she thought that people would say exactly what you have.’

‘Och, that’s too clever for me,’ said Mrs Marshall, getting to her feet and stamping away inside as the kettle started to whistle. I followed after her and leaned against the doorway. She poured a little water into a fat brown teapot, swirled it around and then sloshed it out into the stone sink with a contemptuous gesture that could hardly have been more so had she actually spat. And I agreed. It was too clever a double bluff, but then so was the photograph album, and that was true.

‘Did the cottage need the redecoration?’ I said, thinking that perhaps if they had stayed a week in real squalor it would look as though they knew in advance that a fire was about to remove the need to do something about it.

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘But there! That’s “ladies” for you.’ I cringed, sure that I came within the sweep of this judgement.

‘Mrs Marshall,’ I said, summoning courage, ‘why not just humour me? What harm will it do at least to discuss it? And imagine if I were right, and poor Cara is not dead after all, only hiding somewhere in some kind of trouble and we find her.’ Thus, unscrupulously, I overcame her better judgement and wiping her eyes and sighing, she submitted to my questions at last.

‘Think very, very carefully,’ I began. ‘You know which Miss Duffy is which, don’t you? Now, when was the last time you saw Cara?’

‘The day before the fire,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘Her and her mother were out for a walk after their dinner and I heard them laughing away about something and looked up and there they were.’ This was not at all what I wanted to hear and it perplexed me.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘You’re absolutely sure that all three ladies were at the cottage right up until the day before the fire?’ This would undo my idea about why the photographs had to be taken in just one session.

‘No doubt about it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘I even thought there was four of them to start with, till you tellt me that was a maid. Some maid, I thought, you don’t see a lass in service dressed like that round here, but she’d be Edinburgh, eh? However, that’s by the by. There was definitely three right up until the end. I couldn’t get peace for them marching up and down my lane and talk talk talking at the tops of their voices. The mother and the cheery one, then the mother and the miserable one and I thought to myself more than once if those two lassies were mine I’d take the back of my hand to both. The Dear knows why they could not all go out for their walk together and save their mother’s feet. That poor woman must have been worn out by the end of the day.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Or if the lasses were at daggers drawn why could one of them not go out by her own self? Chaperones! I thought we’d got past all that nonsense by now.’

I stared at her, my cup of tea halfway between its saucer and my lips. First one and then the other? I banged down my cup and fished in my pocket for Alec’s snapshot of Cara.

‘Tell me who this is, Mrs Marshall,’ I demanded. She took the snap and holding it at arm’s length for her long sight she scrutinized it for an agonizing time before pronouncing.

‘That’s thon wee maid I saw, and dear God in heaven, this get-up’s even worse than the other one. Where do they get the money to dress like that? I’m wondering if I’m not too old to go into service in Edinburgh myself.’

‘This,’ I said, coming to stand behind her and look over her shoulder at the smiling face under its velvet hat and over its squashy fox fur, ‘this is Cara Duffy. Now, tell me again exactly when you saw her.’

It took a good half-hour and another pot of tea for Mrs Marshall to get off her chest everything that she knew and everything she felt, and to decide whether it was wickedness or merely cheek. The bare bones of it were that she had seen Cara pedalling furiously in the direction of Borgue on Tuesday evening and had not seen her return. No unknown boat and no car at all had been seen or heard. Neither Mrs Marshall nor, we were sure, her daughter-in-law had seen ‘the girls’ together at any time. I cursed my own stupidity as I remembered young Mrs Marshall’s calling them two peas in a pod and old Mrs Marshall herself not being able to tell which was which. Clemence and Cara Duffy were the least like one another of any pair of sisters one could hope to see, and only a dolt like me would not have heard alarm bells long before now.

‘Aye well,’ she concluded at last. ‘It’s a wicked thing to do and I’m glad I’ll never likely see them again for I could not promise to bite my tongue and let them think they’d fooled me. But praise God that lassie didn’t go up in flames after all, madam, and I hope you get to the bottom of it so’s I can tell everyone, for I’m sure I’m not the only one that cannot sleep for thinking about it.’

‘Oh, I’ll get to the bottom, Mrs Marshall,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about that. They’ve made far too many stupid mistakes for me not to. I can hardly believe they let Cara cycle away in full view of whoever happened to look and see her. Such a silly risk to take.’

This thought was still troubling me as I made my way back down the lane at last. Time was getting on, but Drysdale would come and look for me if I missed our rendezvous, I was sure, and I wanted to go and stare. Now I knew for a fact that a fraud had been perpetrated, I felt no concern at all at being seen standing there like a ghoul. I passed Sandy Marshall’s cottage and carried on to the road end and the start of the dunes, then turned left along the path to the Duffys’ cottage gate and stopped. The blackened depression in the earth and sudden cutting off of the bright shingle path seemed even more grotesque than they had before. It ought not to have been so, now that I knew no one had died there, but perhaps it was because I had now seen the place for myself. I had seen the photograph of the tea-table under the tree, the blossom-heavy branches in the foreground half-hiding the cottage behind. Now the tree – cherry, I rather thought – had its blooms and soft green leaf buds shrivelled and browned on one side by the heat of the flames. I felt my mouth twist in distaste and I turned away. Then I turned slowly back, looking at the tree and trying to summon the image of the cottage behind it, with its funny little peaked windows and something else I knew had been there but could not bring to mind. The branches of blossom, the upper part of the house showing through it here and there, and what? I stood opening and shutting my eyes, trying to dredge up the picture as though from my boots, until Bunty, sensing my tension perhaps, or maybe just bored, began to whine.

When I emerged on to the lane again, I noticed a second path leading off directly opposite, suggesting another house. Immediately, I remembered Mrs Marshall’s scorn about ‘they wooden hooses’. There must be another; the Duffys’ was one of a pair. I walked along the narrow path and sure enough around a bend and past a clump of gorse lay another white gate and another shingle path. Even though I had hoped for it, it stopped me short to see a cottage identical to the one I had glimpsed in the photograph album, as though the patch of black earth was a lie. I crept forward and stood at the fence.

It was a pretty house of the kind one must call a cottage despite its size, although a very different sort of cottage from the Marshalls’ homesteads. It had a wide porch, bounded by decorative wood banisters, and the peaked dormer windows I remembered to its upstairs. Most sweetly of all it had a single chimney right in the middle of its roof which made it look like a toffee apple standing on its head with its handle sticking out at the top. I felt a stirring of misgiving again, one that I could not quite place, but before I could give it my attention I was startled by the sound of a door creaking open, and the untidy young man with the cats appeared on the porch.

‘Hello again,’ he said, amicably enough. Certainly as amicably as I deserved, leaning on his gate and staring at his house.

‘I was just admiring your adorable chimney,’ I said, adding nothing to the store of dignity which my earlier ramblings on dogs had left me. However, the young man merely laughed and looked upwards.

‘I think it looks like a sink plunger,’ he said. ‘Rather inconvenient to tell the truth, but even in a wooden house the chimney must be brick and it’s easier to make one stack in the middle and have all the fires opening off it. And fires and wooden houses are rather a hot topic at the moment, aren’t they? If you’ll pardon my pun.’ I flushed, realizing that he thought I was sightseeing, come like some villager to gawp at the nearest thing to the place it all happened.

‘Inconvenient?’ I said, making conversation to show him I was unaffected by his insinuation and plumping for the only bit of his speech which seemed to offer scope for further chat.

‘The central chimney. Having to have all the rooms open off one another without a hallway and having all the fireplaces across the corners.’ He stretched luxuriously, a stretch with just a suggestion of a scratch at the end of it. ‘Not bad for me since I live on my own and can draw up my chair and hog it, but I’d hate to be jostling with a wife and a gaggle of frost-bitten children.’

Feeling very much that I represented the world’s producers of unwanted brats, I withdrew from this unpleasant individual and took myself off to meet my motor car.

Frustration was evidently the order of the day, however, since Drysdale and I now chugged back to Gatehouse at an infuriating five miles an hour behind a coal cart whose driver seemed not at all concerned with our plight. And when we turned into the wide main street of the town and Drysdale pulled out to work off the tension by roaring the last five hundred yards with his foot to the floorboards, I frustrated him yet further, for having spied ‘E. McNally’ painted on the side of the cart as we flashed past it, I instructed him to stop while I got out and had a word. I had to ask about Mrs Duffy’s coal order, I thought; that final check would establish beyond the doubt we were already beyond that she had set the fire and burned the cottage down.

‘Mr McNally,’ I called, hurrying forward to catch him before he hefted a sack on to his shoulder. He turned, showing me that spectacularly dirty face that a coalman always has, and for which I have often felt envy, thinking how very satisfying it must be to bathe when one starts out so filthy, and how unlike my own bathing which is almost completely for the sake of form except when I’ve been hunting. Mr McNally blinked his blue, dolly’s eyes in his black face and flashed a friendly smile with his dazzling coalman’s teeth.

‘I’m Mrs Gilver,’ I began. ‘A friend of Mrs Duffy, and I was asked by her to take care of settling up with the housekeeper and anything else that was left unfinished in all the confusion.’ I waited, hoping that this would be blunt enough. It was not. ‘I just wondered, just now when I saw your cart, whether there was anything outstanding that I could take care of.’ Still nothing. ‘Did Mrs Duffy have a regular delivery and pay up at the end of the season or are you all fair and square? Please don’t hesitate at all if you’re waiting to be paid – I’m more than happy.’ Mr McNally was shaking his head.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Mrs Duffy said she’d drop me a note when she was getting low and she paid me when I delivered.’

‘But of course you would know not to deliver it now,’ I said, making doubly, trebly sure. E. McNally looked at me as though I were an imbecile.

‘There wasna any order outstanding, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But I’ll venture if there was I’d have known to ignore it.’ I nodded, gave him a little something anyway for his trouble and got back into the car. So, Mrs Duffy was to have dropped a line when the coal got low, and there was the coal hole at Reiver’s Rest scraped clean for all to see with no order outstanding. I wondered if this detail had escaped her planning or if she had decided not to advertise in advance the fact that she had used all that fuel in case the news of the fire should jog an uneasy thought and start the coalman’s tongue wagging.

Drysdale turned the car again and I knew he took the chance while checking over his shoulder to fire a look at me, searching for some clue as to why I should leap from the car and accost a coalman in the street. His look was matched by that on the face of Mr McNally as he watched me pull away.

Thus after a single day, with my work in Galloway complete, and one or two more of the world’s populace now believing me to be an idiot, I headed for home again. I was ready to tell Hugh that the puppies were all earmarked for friends of the family and that I had changed my mind anyway after both Bunty and I had been snapped at by the mother with her teeth like little icicles and been told by her doting owner that this was something for which the breed was known.

We arrived back at Gilverton just as lamps were being lit, and while Grant took herself off in high dudgeon to unpack the case of clothes for a week’s visit she had packed only two days before, I sought out Hugh to tell the tale of woe. I could hear voices from his library and smelled pipe smoke alongside the usual reek of Hugh’s cigar so arranging a smile of wifely and hostessly serenity upon my face I threw open the door and strode in. (When visitors are there I do not knock and keep my feet on the hall carpet.)

‘Dandy my dear,’ said Hugh. (When visitors are there he reacts with delight to any glimpse of me.) ‘Just in time. What will you have to drink?’

‘Welcome home, Dandy,’ said Alec Osborne. ‘This is an unexpected bonus, I must say. I feared I might miss you.’

But for some reason the sight of the two of them on either side of the fire like that, a heap of dozing dogs between their feet, presented a domestic and social challenge to which I felt unequal after the long drive and the excitements of the day before. I excused myself hastily, promising that a half-hour’s rest should render me fit for the dinner table.

Up in my room, Grant was slamming around with her mouth still set in a grim line but with a tell-tale loosening of her shoulders which told me that she was happiest really to be home again with her own irons and well-drilled laundry maids waiting below. I sat at my dressing table and began to remove hatpins until I caught her eye in the glass. She looked significantly at me and then at my bed where, miracle upon miracle, there against the pillows sat a familiar black leather album tied with a ribbon. I threw off my coat, kicked off my shoes and climbed up on to the counterpane, drawing the album towards me like a lover, sure that inside it cast-iron, rock-solid, gilt-edged answers were soon to be found.