Bothersome Number of Corpses

7

My joy was unconstrained on learning that, while dining with the girls was a daily duty, breakfasting with them was confined to Sundays. On this Monday morning the other mistresses and I were to be served porridge, eggs and bacon – or in my case coffee and rolls – in a little breakfast room off the staff common room. Even better was the realisation that Miss Shanks was not amongst our number.

‘Oh, try dragging Shanks away from her girls in the morning!’ said little Miss Christopher, looking more mole-like than ever this morning in a dark-grey coat and skirt of velvety nap.

‘Well, I suppose that’s when any new sore throats and dicky tummies are most to the fore,’ said Miss Lovage, with a delighted nastiness I could neither put my finger on nor ignore. I stared as she raked back her black and white hair with a ringed hand, then I exchanged a look with Miss Glennie, who seemed just as puzzled as me.

‘You see, Miss Ivy Shanks wasn’t always a headmistress,’ Miss Lovage continued.

‘But she’s a fine headmistress now,’ said Miss Barclay, and set to buttering her toast so ferociously she all but tore it into rags. Her voice was clipped, her lips pursed, even her head of tight curls seemed tighter than before.

‘And,’ said Miss Christopher, ‘since it was your own dear Miss Fielding who elevated her I wonder at your sneering.’

‘I don’t sneer,’ said Miss Lovage, looking down her aquiline nose and curling her top lip, and so unfortunately producing a sneer which could have stood as the very definition in a pictorial dictionary.

‘What Miss Lovage is hinting at,’ said Miss Barclay, now trying to patch her toast back together again with globs of marmalade, ‘is the fact that when Miss Fielding and Miss Shanks, as colleagues, first conceived of their own school, Fielding was Latin mistress and Miss Shanks was on the less academic side of things.’

‘Miss Shanks was under-matron,’ Miss Lovage snapped. ‘Less academic indeed!’

‘A matron?’ I said, and once again caught Miss Glennie’s eye. She was no less surprised than me but, unlike me, she was trying not to look so.

‘And Mrs Brown was the cook,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘I’m only surprised she hasn’t stepped into Miss Fielding’s shoes to fill the vacancy.’

‘Dear Miss Fielding,’ said Miss Barclay, attempting a honeyed tone but failing rather miserably at it owing to her clenched teeth, ‘had a vision. For the girls’ education, of course, but not only that. She believed that good food and good healthy habits were just as important as what they learned in the classroom. It was absolutely her conviction that a matron was as important as a Latin mistress.’

‘And she believed in seeing the good in everyone,’ added Miss Christopher. ‘We should all remember that without Miss Fielding none of us would be here.’

‘It’s… um… wonderful that the school is thriving without her,’ I said. ‘If she was- I mean given that she was such a visionary. One could easily assume that her loss would change things.’

‘Oh, things have changed,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘Things have certainly changed. I’m not sure I should as readily have sunk my savings into a school run by a cook and a matron.’

I thought then about what Hugh had said, on the subject of single women and what they did with their money. It was interesting that Miss Lovage was more than just the art mistress here.

‘But Miss Shanks sees the good in people too.’ It was the first time Miss Glennie had spoken, and she did so with a tremor in her voice. ‘I mean, I think Miss Fielding sounds wonderful but it’s Miss Shanks I have to thank for my being here.’

‘My investment in St Columba’s was considerable,’ said Miss Lovage, clearly disliking to hear the absent Miss Shanks given all the gratitude.

‘You sound as if you’re suddenly regretting it, Anna,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘We don’t normally hear you casting it up to the rest of us.’ There was a warning note in her voice that I could not interpret.

‘It’s just gone a bit far, that’s all,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘Double duties here, an obliging vicar there and… well, agency staff.’ She gave Miss Glennie and me an unconvincing smile as she thus disparaged us. ‘Miss Lipscott was a scholar and a lady, and Mademoiselle Beauclerc was teaching the girls true Parisian French. And they both understood the artistic life. Without them, and without Miss Fielding, what does St Columba’s have to offer?’

Several of us took in a sharp breath at that. Miss Barclay expelled hers in a speech, delivered with great control, through white lips.

‘Geography and mathematics, to name two things,’ she said. ‘And art.’

‘Good gracious, Dorothy,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘I didn’t mean the girls! Who cares about the wretched girls – they’ll all just go off and get married anyway. I meant what does St Columba’s have to offer me?’

There was a stony silence after this remark, which gathered weight until it threatened to crush us. Miss Barclay, once again, got her wits about her first and broke it.

‘Let’s change the subject,’ she said. She did not, however, offer a subject to take up and the blanket of silence settled back down over us, except for the sound of Miss Christopher doggedly crunching on a rasher of very crisp bacon.

‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘not exactly a cheerful topic, but I’d like to ask you all to tell me what you can about Fleur Lipscott’s last few days here.’ I was aware of all eyes upon me but I looked unconcernedly out of the opposite window and sailed on. ‘It’s not nosiness – I know how much that offends at least Miss Lovage – it’s just that when I told her sisters she’d bolted they badgered me and badgered me for some explanation or assurance and I promised I would try to find something out for them.’

All of them, Miss Barclay behind her little glasses, Miss Christopher under her bushy brows, Miss Lovage inside her rings of black pencil, and Miss Glennie whose eyes were unadorned and so lashless and browless in that fair Scottish way as to make her face appear naked, all of them simply stared at me.

‘Explanation of what on earth was wrong,’ I went on, ‘or assurance that nothing was, but they can’t simply leave it as a mystery, shrug and pass on. She’s their beloved baby sister and if they don’t get some answers they’re likely to land here demanding them. They’re very worried about her. Taking off like that.’

‘Her sisters?’ said Miss Lovage. ‘News to me she had sisters.’

‘And didn’t she go home?’ said Miss Barclay. ‘To take care of some sick relation?’

‘I think these “sisters” are pulling your leg, Miss Gilver,’ said Miss Christopher.

It was my turn now to stare around at them. Even the girls hadn’t swallowed the stories of one sick relation after another; surely the mistresses did not really believe it?

‘She was fine,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Just the same as ever.’

‘But can you be sure?’ I asked. ‘You all seem to spend such a lot of time alone in your rooms. Would you know?’

‘We saw Miss Lipscott at every meal, and she was in her classroom all day every day,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘She was quite fine.’

‘And what about the evenings?’ I asked. ‘Did you see her then? Did she sit in the staffroom with you?’

‘We are very busy women,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘We sit in the staffroom when we can but we all have work to do. And none of us nursemaids the rest.’ She had rolled up a piece of bread into a sort of pad and now proceeded to wipe the egg yolk and bacon fat from her plate with it. She popped the little piece of bread into her mouth and chewed it resolutely. When she had swallowed she washed it down with a swig of tea. She really did have the worst table manners I could remember seeing.

‘Have you considered, Miss Gilver,’ she went on, ‘that Miss Lipscott’s sisters are simply stringing you along? They knew what she was and how she lived, but they would rather not know, and so they wring their hands and call her their baby sister and ask – wide-eyed – for explanations.’

‘What can you mean?’ I said. She was spot-on about Pearl and Aurora’s habit of singing tra-la-la and looking the other way rather than face troubling facts head-on, but I was lost as to specifics.

‘Miss Lipscott was a funny one, and getting funnier,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘A great wanderer in the night, always taking off on solitary walks, never wanting any company, never saying where she was going or where she’d been. And so relentlessly gloomy! An oddball and no loss. Tell her precious sisters that.’

‘Wandering in the night?’ I said. ‘You mean sleepwalking?’

‘I mean slipping out after supper and hoping no one noticed,’ said Miss Christopher. She had a particular way of drawing her double chin back into her neck and turning her mouth down at the corners. It was impressive as a means of conveying disapproval, but if she had ever seen it in her mirror she would not have done it again.

‘And yet Miss Fielding and Miss Shanks had no concerns about her with the girls?’ I said. ‘She sounds not to be a suitable example to them at all.’

‘We told you what a collector of lame ducks Miss Fielding was,’ said Miss Barclay.

‘Speak for yourself, Dorothy!’ said Miss Christopher, chuckling again. Miss Barclay, realising what she had said, tittered too. Miss Lovage merely looked pained, and Miss Glennie did a fair impersonation of someone who has looked out of a train window, realised that she was hurtling along the wrong line and was plotting how soon she could get off again.

Miss Christopher wiped her lips and glanced at her wristwatch.

‘Well, ladies,’ she said. ‘As you know, I like to have a good hour to myself before the lesson bell so I’ll bid you all good morning.’ She dropped her napkin onto her plate – not the discourtesy to the laundry maid it might have been had she not wiped up so assiduously with that piece of bread – and left the room.

‘What time do lessons start then?’ said Miss Glennie.

‘Nine thirty sharp,’ said Miss Barclay.

‘As late as that!’ Miss Glennie said before she could help herself, then she bit her lip and gave an awkward smile. It is never the done thing for a new girl to find fault with established routine, I supposed. Secretly, though, I agreed with her. Leaving the girls lolling around aimless until half past nine in the morning seemed rather decadent (and all of a piece with the heated pool and the cocoa). Still, it gave me time to do something useful beforehand.

All was quiet at the little wooden shack on the harbourside, the door locked, the blind drawn down and a cardboard sign proclaiming that not until noon would Aldo’s be open again. I stepped around the side and threaded my way along the narrow alley, then I let myself in at the gate to the yard. If Joe was going to serve fried fish and chips to the masses at noon he would be here already, peeling his potatoes and stirring his batter mixture.

Sure enough, when I squinted in the back door, which was standing open and unobscured by any washing today, I could see him on his stool with the pail at his feet and the knife in his hand, but he was stock still.

‘Mr Aldo?’ I said, stepping inside. He started violently, sending the bucket of water whirling across the floor.

‘Sorry!’ I burst out, flailing after the pail and getting fairly well soaked for my trouble.

‘I sorry,’ said Joe. ‘I lost in my thoughts today.’

I set the pail down firmly on the linoleum again and brushed the worst of the water from the front of my skirt.

‘Sit,’ said Joe. ‘Good to see you. Very lonely here since Friday.’

‘Yes, well, that’s what I came about really,’ I said. ‘I spoke to Sabbatina. She’s lonely too. Very unhappy. I think it would do her good to come down the hill and spend some time with you.’

‘Sabbatina is lonely?’ said Joe. ‘Up in her school with all her friends?’

Only a fiend would have told him about the little space between his daughter and the other eleven girls at her dinner table.

‘Well, sad, anyway,’ I said. ‘I know what you said about her staying away in case your wife came home again, but now that she knows she needs her father’s comfort. You could comfort one another, couldn’t you?’

‘Sabbatina knows?’ he said.

‘I thought you told her.’ I could see from his expression though that I was mistaken. ‘Yes, she knows. Perhaps her mother telephoned to the school as well as to you?’

Joe stared at me for a long time before answering.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. He was nodding slowly and I very much hoped that he was not about to start bawling again.

‘I wish my wife not leave me,’ he said at last. ‘I wish I saw her and her man friend that night when she go walking. I and not this stranger. I knock his head from his neck. I kick him over ten fields with my boot and then my wife is still here with me and my carissima Sabbatina not sad like now.’

It was my turn for silent nodding. He was beginning to whip himself up and I did not know how to stop him.

‘Did he even try? This one who watches and sees and says nothing to me? Did he say, “Signora Aldo, why are you here with that man who is not the good Giuseppe?” Hah? No! Why he not speak up – one man for another man? Or why he not come to me and tell me – one man to another man?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a man. It was a girl.’

‘Hmph!’ said Joe, emphatically if perplexingly. ‘So. A girl. A bad girl to be walking outside when the night is dark, no? And a bad wicked girl who will come in here and laugh at me with her friends.’

‘I don’t think so, Mr Aldo,’ I said. ‘She’s a nice sort of girl, really, despite the walks. She works for the police sergeant’s wife and the boy she does the walking with is the constable. Couldn’t be more respectable, really.’

‘Hmph,’ said Joe again. Then he cocked his head. ‘Here is come my potatoes,’ he said and as he spoke a boy in an apron appeared in the yard, struggling under the weight of a sack which looked to be full of pig-iron from its lumpy shape and the trouble he was having with it.

‘There ye go, Mr Aldo,’ he said, letting the sack drop onto the kitchen floor and straightening. ‘One or two wee tatties for ye!’ He stretched his neck first to one side and then to the other and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Joe Aldo leapt to his feet and pressed a coin into the other hand, thanking the boy.

‘Same again tomorrow?’ the lad said.

‘No, no, I come to the market tomorrow, same as for ever,’ said Joe.

The boy looked rather crestfallen but then rubbed the coin on his shirtsleeve and flipped it up in the air with a grin.

‘Better’n a poke in the eye,’ he said and left, whistling.

‘I made arrangement on Saturday morning,’ said Joe. ‘Delivery. Save me go to market in case Rosa come home and I gone. I forget to change. But now she gone and she not come home…’

‘Life goes on, Mr Aldo,’ I said. He was untying the neck of the potato sack but he turned and smiled at me, a smile with enough courage and sadness in it to melt my heart a little. ‘You have your daughter and your cooking and believe me, there are many men who would be happy these days to have such a solid little business as this one.’

‘I do fine here. Many people come. Not all the people, but enough.’

I thought about the throngs who had been there at luncheon time on Saturday and wondered at his mild grumbling. But then I supposed a real businessman would not be satisfied unless everyone in the town ate his dinner from Aldo’s every evening and I had, it was true, heard more than one say they never went near the place.

‘And I look out of my window at the beautiful sea and the sky and the green grass,’ said Joe. ‘I am a lucky man.’

‘It’s wonderful to hear you speak that way,’ I said. ‘To hear you a little more cheerful.’

‘What business is your husband?’ said Mr Aldo. ‘You married lady, eh, bellissima? No way men not fight other men to make you married lady, eh?’

I willed myself not to simper, although it is hard to resist when a man with dancing black eyes and a smile as wide as the sea calls one ‘bellissima’. (For some reason, flirting in an Italian accent did not excite the outrage I should have felt had my admirer been the catcher of the fish, or digger of the potatoes, rather than the fryer of them.)

‘He’s a farmer,’ I said, for this was what Hugh always said these days, now that his earlier answer (to wit: ‘gentleman’) was wont to meet with resentful glares or out-and-out guffaws.

‘Ohhh,’ said Joe Aldo. ‘And he no mind you… detective, and not feed chickens and milk cows.’ I was sure he was teasing, but it was impossible to take offence at him.

‘Not at all,’ I said.

‘And you no want him help you… finger smudges and clues?’

‘He is an excellent farmer,’ I said. ‘And I am an excellent detective. We’re both happy this way.’

He straightened and gave me a more serious and very searching look.

‘You happy,’ he said. ‘Good. Bellissima signora should be happy. I happy for you.’

A deaf dowager in her nineties would have blushed at that and I did not even try to disguise it. Indeed, my pink cheeks seemed to make him happier than ever.

‘Well, I hope I shan’t make you cross with me when I say this,’ I said. ‘Mr Osborne and I can’t, in all fairness, keep searching for your wife now that we know she is alive and well. There’s the body, for one thing.’ He crossed himself and uttered a short prayer. ‘And things are dreadful up at the school, with all the mistresses leaving and no one knowing why. We really can do much more good there than we can do for you.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Joe, some of his old spirit returning. ‘You go – excellent and so charming detective – and your Mr Osborne too. I thank you.’

‘I’m so glad you understand,’ I said.

‘Sì, sì,’ said Joe. ‘Rosa is gone – my heart is to break – but the poor dead lady need you and the ladies in the school too. Not my Rosa and me.’

I left then but could not help looking behind me with a fond smile at the place as I strolled back along the harbourside towards the town.

‘Hoi! Dandy!’ said Alec, leaning out of his bedroom window at the Crown. He was in his shirtsleeves and his hair was still slicked back wet from his bath. ‘You look as if you’ve been walking in a bluebell wood with your true love,’ he shouted down as I got closer.

‘Alec, shut up, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. All around us people were turning to see what such a thing would look like and I hunched my neck down into my coat collar to avoid their gaze.

‘Come up,’ said Alec. At the next window along I saw the curtain move and was sure that the shadow there was the convalescent widow. Hands fussed their way out from behind the lace and brought the sash down with a sharp rap into its frame.

‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘Apart from anything else, if that was the quarter chiming then I need to hurry up to the school for the start of lessons. Come down and walk with me.’

He was at my side in less than a minute (oh, to have a man’s toilet instead of my own, even with bobbed hair and zip fasteners and Grant to mix the lash-black), determined to solve the riddle of my shining eyes and the small smile I could not quite persuade to leave my lips.

‘I went to see Joe to tell him we can’t keep looking for Rosa,’ I said.

‘I’d have done that,’ said Alec, handing me up the first and steepest of the cliff steps.

‘I wanted to tell him how unhappy Sabbatina is too,’ I said. ‘Oof! Thank you, I’m all right on my own from here. She found out about her mother leaving and she’s in low spirits.’

‘Doesn’t sound too enchanting so far,’ said Alec. ‘Why the bounce in your step and the broad grin?’

‘Oh, too silly for words, but Giuseppe Aldo is such a flirt and I suppose I’m not quite beyond being flattered by it yet.’

‘Not a flirt, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘A charmer, I’d say. Don’t forget how he had me hugging him in the street after a day’s acquaintance. You have nothing to berate yourself with for being taken in.’

‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘I daresay he won’t be alone for long then. Any of the women round here who’re used to fish guts and monosyllables might be happy to try hot fat and sweet nothings.’

‘If he can pry his heart away from Rosa, anyway,’ Alec said. ‘But he might pine for ever.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘His spirits are lifting already. He was talking about Sabbatina and the sunshine and sea breezes when I left him. I’m sure he does love his wife with that heaving Latin heart of his, but he’s an India rubber ball and he’ll bob back to the surface.’

‘Anyway, thanks to you cutting the ties he is no longer our problem,’ Alec said. ‘So I feel no compunction in sloping off on the 10.05.’

‘Sloping where?’ I said. ‘To do what?’

‘Did you know that scholastic agencies open at eight o’clock in the morning?’ he replied. ‘And of course newspaper offices keep notoriously early hours, worse than bakers. I’ve done a day’s work already. Oh, thank God!’ We had reached the top of the cliff steps and come out on level ground. ‘Twenty past nine, Dandy, let’s sit a minute while I brief you. And I must say the revelations of life in a girls’ school go on – nine thirty?’

‘Oh, I know,’ I said. ‘I thought they’d be knee-deep in slide rules and conjugations by this time too. Anyway, the sloping?’

‘North Yorkshire,’ said Alec. ‘It’s a devil of a journey too unless I catch this first train to Dumfries and hope for a tail wind. A very tight connection in Carlisle.’

I sighed and waited.

‘Yes,’ Alec said. ‘Right. The Lambourne Agency popped Miss Blair’s name right out as soon as I mentioned girls and cricket and apparently she’s working at an establishment by the name of The Bridge House School for Young Ladies, which is somewhere out in the middle of the moors north of Pickering.’

‘The agency just told you where she was?’ I said. ‘To help you poach her?’

‘Well, she’s none too happy about the moor, it seems,’ said Alec. ‘So she’s still on the books, as it were. Anyway, north of Pickering, Dan. Not ringing any bells for you?’

I shook my head.

‘The Forresters’ house is less than twenty miles away.’

‘Of course!’ I said.

‘And since Elf was a cousin of theirs, I think there’s bound to be some leavening of the Lipscott loyalty with a little Forrester loyalty. Not to say in Aurora – but perhaps her husband? So I thought I’d stop in on them under some pretext or other and see what I can find out.’

‘And you don’t fear more dogs? Either at the school or the Forresters’?’

Alec laughed.

‘I’d put on moleskin britches if I had them,’ he said. ‘But I told you yesterday, the farmer’s wife actually set those dogs on me. I’ve never been snubbed by a dog of its own free will in my life. Plenty of cats, naturally, but dogs love me.’

‘Strange way to offer bed and breakfast,’ I said, then shook the thought away. ‘What do you hope to learn from the Forresters anyway?’

‘Well, the newspaper reports were very sketchy. Accidental death. Nothing to say whether he shot himself cleaning a gun or came off his horse crossing a ditch or anything.’

‘How very odd. Go for Mrs Forrester senior,’ I said. ‘She’s always rather disapproved of Aurora and if you work up the current scandal with Fleur you might well loosen her tongue.’

‘And what would you suggest as a method?’ Alec said. ‘Moral high ground? Flirting? Like Joe?’ He gave me a sly look, still teasing.

‘God, no,’ I said. ‘Fenella Forrester is a formidable woman of the old school – absolutely no nonsense about her. If I had to get her talking I’d go along the… good plain commonsensical route.’ Alec looked puzzled. ‘You know: it’s all a bit of a mess and too silly for words so we’d better tidy it up before someone trips and turns an ankle.’

‘I’m not sure I can pull that off,’ Alec said. ‘Not sure any man could.’

‘I shall treat that as a compliment to my sex,’ I said. ‘No doubt wrongly. Also, if you do get hold of Aurora – and she’s a much better bet than Pearl, which is probably why it’s been Pearl who was delegated to speak to us; Aurora’s far from bright and therefore easier to winkle things out of – you should use a modified version of the same thing. All too silly and let’s get it straightened out for poor Fleur.’

‘And there’s no way on earth I can pull off that one,’ Alec said. ‘Really, Dandy, I was feeling tiptop and all go until you started helping. Now I doubt whether it’s worth the train fare.’

‘Well, I’m not going,’ I said, standing up and pummelling myself where I had been resting against the numbing stone of the parapet. ‘I’ve got the third form for Tam o’Shanter any min-’ I was interrupted by the clang of the lesson bell and immediately upon it came the now familiar sound of girls’ feet tramping and girls’ voices clamouring. ‘And someone in this place must know something about why the mistresses are scattering to the four winds and be willing to tell me.’

‘Not to worry,’ said Alec. ‘I’m sure Miss Blair will have no hesitation in telling me.’ With that he and I both sprang from our marks and set out to learn more and faster than the other, thinking only of winning and crowing and not at all of poor Fleur or No. 5 or any of the vanishing mistresses or putative murders. One wonders at times whether this constant – or at any rate, frequent – immersion in crime and brutality is good for one. I was thankful that my two boys were going to be ‘farmers’ like their father and that neither of them would follow in my footsteps, for even amongst the constabulary of Portpatrick I could trace the path downwards from the open heart and clear head of a Constable Reid to the hard-bitten mien and flinty soul of a Sergeant Turner. Perhaps, I mused to myself as I followed the corridor to Fleur’s classroom, here was the explanation for the nature of the sergeant which had always puzzled me: quite simply, it was the low point on the journey through the heart of darkness, inspectors having survived it and emerged on the other side and the lowly ranks having not yet reached its black depths.

I swung into the English classroom and saw twelve little girls staring down a heart of darkness all of their own. Twelve copies of Chaucer were open on their desks and twelve pairs of eyes looked lifelessly up from them as I entered.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Now-’ but I had forgotten to leave time for the answering chorus, slow as a dirge.

‘Good morning, Miss Gilver.’

‘Yes, quite, thank you. Now, girls, close your books, please, and pass them along to the ends. We’re having a change.’ I swept into the book cupboard with the not inconsiderable pile of Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and emerged again with the much more modest pile of Complete Works of Robert Burns. I suppose had he lived to see forty he might have run to a thicker volume, but I could not help but attribute my lighter load at that moment to his bonny nature rather than his sickly lungs.

‘Open up to page one hundred and forty-three, please, girls,’ I said. ‘And… you there. Start reading.’

‘Marion, Miss Gilver,’ said the child I had picked upon. She fluttered the pages and stood up, clearing her throat.

‘Tam o’Shanter,’ she announced. ‘When chapman…’ She put her finger on the page and looked up. ‘What does chapman mean, Miss Gilver?’

‘An excellent question, Marion,’ I replied. ‘Does anyone know?’ There were blank looks all around. ‘And what do we do if there’s a word we don’t know?’ I continued, riffling hastily to the back of the book to check. ‘We look it up in the Glossary, don’t we? Look it up in the Glossary, Marion.’ Not only did she but so did the rest of them, keen little scholars all, and the turning pages caused a breeze for a moment until they all found what they were looking for and their arms started to wave like ears of wheat. I nodded towards the nearest waving arm.

‘Pedlar, Miss Gilver,’ called out the child, as she shot to her feet and sank back down again. I could see that this off-the-cuff translation of Burns’ Scots was going to be a good dose of healthy exercise for their arms and legs as well as their tongues and brains.

‘Good girl,’ I said.

‘When chapman billies fill the street,’ Marion resumed. ‘And drouthy…’

The pages were fluttering again.

‘Thirsty, Miss Gilver.’

‘Splendid.’

‘… neighbours neighbours meet.’

If this were all there was to it, I thought to myself, sitting back and almost enjoying the halting recital and the punctuating translations, then I was a marvellous teacher.

I thought too that I agreed with Giuseppe Aldo about his daughter’s talents and not at all with Miss Shanks’s dismissal of them, for when it came time for Sabbatina to stand and recite, she did so in a clear and pleasing voice and showed in her phrasing that she understood exactly what the words conveyed (unlike some of the girls who rumty-tummed their way through the lines regardless of their meaning). I was a little unsettled by hearing her describe Tam and the married landlady of the inn sharing their ‘secret, sweet and precious favours’, unable not to think of her mother and the nameless suitor who had charmed her away from her husband and home, dreading to hear one of the other girls whisper or giggle behind her hand. But either none of Sabbatina’s classmates knew of the scandal, or they were too innocent to draw the grubby connection which sprang to my mind. Or, I allowed myself to think, they were too enthralled by the exciting material so skilfully chosen by their new favourite mistress.

By morning coffee time, however, when the girls went outside to run around for ten minutes, I was back on solid ground with my heels still ringing from how hard I had hit it. For the fifth form were lolling in a haystack with Piers Plowman as he dreamed one of his unfathomable dreams and while, to the casual glance, it was less terrifying than Tam’s escapade with the ghosties and ghoulies it struck terror into me, for I knew not how to pronounce it, parse it, gloss it, or imagine what examination questions might have been set upon it or how in heaven I was ever to mark the answers to them.

‘Um,’ I had said in desperation, ‘translate the next thirty lines, girls.’

‘Thirty, Miss Gilver?’ they had groaned as one.

I glanced at the gobbledygook stretching down the page.

‘All right, twenty,’ I said. ‘And keep very quiet, on your honour, please. I’ve just got to slip out and see Miss Shanks about something.’

Thankfully she was not out on the cliff in her underclothes leading a class in callisthenics, or marking worn linen in a cupboard somewhere – I had not forgotten that she was a matron at heart (indeed, perhaps it explained why she was such a very peculiar headmistress, in a way) – but was sitting quietly in her study with fat ledgers open before her.

‘Fielding always used to take care of the accounts,’ she said, slamming a ledger shut with a sharp smack and a puff of dust. ‘It’s Greek to me.’

‘School Certificate papers, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘I shall need to have a look at them if I’m to know what the girls should be swotting up – I mean, studying. And if I’m to be quite sure that I’m all set to mark them too.’ I tried to make this second consideration sound very airy.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Shanks. She stood and went over to a picture on her wall – an unfeasibly highly coloured print of cattle standing knee deep in a loch with glowering mountains behind them – unhooked it and set about opening the safe it was hiding with the largest of the bristling bunch of keys she wore at her belt.

‘Now then, now then,’ she said, stirring the papers inside the safe’s modest chamber with perfect unconcern for their disarrangement. ‘School Cert English…’ She plucked a pale green sheet from amongst the mess she had made. ‘And you might as well take the Higher Cert paper too, while you’re at it.’ A pale pink sheet joined the other. ‘Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.’ She lifted a knee to stop a small pile of letters from cascading out of the safe door onto the floor and managed to pin two or three to the wall. I shot forward and retrieved the rest. I shuffled them back into a bundle and exchanged them for the exam papers. Miss Shanks grinned at me, threw the letters back inside and closed the safe door with a clang.

‘And when do you need the papers for the other forms?’ I said.

‘Oh, there’s a whiley yet,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Exams start in late June – along with the hay fever, you know. If we leave the doors open to the rose gardens half the wee souls have sneezing fits and if we shut them there’s always one or two take to fainting. The examination hall was a ballroom, you know; faces due south, and was never meant to be used during the day.’

‘Well, I’d better get back to my girls,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the papers. I assure you I’ll keep them very safe and return them very soon.’

‘Och, hang on to them if it’ll help,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I’m sure I can trust you with a wee question paper or two, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me quite the most twinkling, glittering look I had yet seen from amongst her collection. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the fifth form – I want you to keep an eye on Clothilde Simmons. She seems a very bright girl. Might be worth some extra tutoring.’

‘Has she just joined the school?’ I said, puzzled as to how a girl could have reached the fifth form and only now be tapped as a scholar.

‘No, she’s been with us since she was an eleven-year-old with scraped knees and a lollipop,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘She’s been hiding her light under a bushel, that’s all. Naughty child!’

When I took in the jotters at the end of the hour I paid particular note to that of Clothilde Simmons, but could not see in the laboured and much rubbed-out and rewritten translation – all fifteen lines of it, since Clothilde was one of the handful who did not make it through to the end – any particular glow of brilliance. And leafing back through the pages that Fleur had marked I saw a great deal of red pencil and a progression of solid Bs and Cs. Perhaps she was a whizz at chemistry or something quite removed from English literature, hence Miss Shanks’s prod about the coaching to round her out and tempt a university to give her a place there.

Piers Plowman, happily, was the low tide of that long first day. After lunch the lower sixth took to Macbeth with an almost unseemly relish, begging and pleading to be the witches, auditioning from their seats with much cackling and hunching of their lithe young forms into the twisted shapes of crones over a cauldron. Needless to say, Rob Roy was greeted by the second form like the Young Pretender arriving from across the sea: one girl threw Silas Marner into the air and shouted hurrah at the news that she need not read another word of it, and only the fact that she caught the book again, firmly, by its cloth covers and did not so much as crease a page saved me from delivering a lecture about the sanctity of the printed word in general and school property in particular.

Still, by the time three o’clock came – for such was the surprisingly early hour at which the St Columba’s girls broke off from their short day of study and flooded back out into the grounds to take up their extra-curricular lolling – my head was awash with new names and old stories and my ears rang with piping voices clamouring ‘Miss Gilver, Miss Gilver’ so that the only thing for it was to take myself off all alone into the sea air and try to walk myself back to my own quiet thoughts and some semblance of tranquillity.

Besides, I had still not seen the cliff top along which Rosa Aldo, her fancy man, Cissie and Willie all had strolled on that fateful evening and from which Constable Reid was so sure No. 5 had tumbled, the cliff top which also led to Low Merrick Farm and the inhospitable farmer’s wife who lived there. I was not sure I could summon the courage to follow Alec up its drive – for I, unlike him, could not vault a gate at a pinch – nor was I so conceited as to think I might find a clue at the castle that others had missed, but I could not help looking carefully at my feet and around the gorse and grass as I went along, with the ruin in view and the sound of the wheeling gulls replacing the girls’ voices with their even more insistent cries.

Of course, there was nothing to be found: cigarette ends and flattened places in what Cissie had called ‘the dips’, corroborating her tale of courting couples holing up there; a few scuffed patches at the edge of the path which might have been places where someone lost her footing and fell, but might have been a hundred other things besides, and all more likely. There were no broken gorse branches where a murderer might have crouched, uncomfortably but discreetly, until a victim appeared; and there was nothing of any interest stashed anywhere either, just endless discarded sweet wrappers and matches, orange peels and apple cores as well as the grubby flags of wool which accumulate wherever sheep and gorse share a breezy headland and the equal weight (it always seems to me) of string and twine and sacking which farmers shed like snake skins in the course of their day.

At Dunskey Castle, I sheltered from the wind long enough to add my budget of match and cigarette end to the trove and then contemplated the journey back again. As is so often the case (but not often enough to inure one to the shock of it), turning around and facing the other way put the sun painfully in my eyes instead of comfortingly at my back. It set the wind against me too, making my nose run and my eyes water; gusting behind me, it had seemed a pleasant helping hand, urging me along. I sniffed, pulled my hat down harder over my forehead and looked about myself. There was Low Merrick Farm, a few fields over, just beyond a little railway bridge, and I knew that where there is a railway bridge (not to mention a farm) there must be a road. I had no desire, anyway, to scramble back over the tracks as I had had to do on my outward journey; although the trains, as Alec attested, were slow and few, the average passenger’s wishes regarding speed and frequency are not those of a trespasser upon the lines and Hugh would never forgive me for being killed in such an unnecessary and bothersome (to the railway company) fashion. His sympathies whenever he heard of a body – be it human or bovine – falling onto a line were always firmly with the upset driver and delayed travellers, and there was nothing to spare for the flattened departed.

On the other hand, I had no particular desire to encounter the pack of ravening collies, but the prospect which did entice me was that of announcing to Alec that I had done so. I suppose, too, that a small part of me did not quite believe the tale of the mysterious arm and hand and the advance of the beasts. It sounded quite unlike sheepdogs, farmers’ wives and in particular anyone who offered home cooking to paying guests.

I was decided, and set off across the sheep-cropped turf to the first of the gates with a swing in my step which belied the way my heart was thudding.

The first of the gates had latches and hinges, despite its share of barbed wire, and the second had hinges and not too nasty a knot holding it closed, so I made it to the last one without having to climb or wriggle. This, however, was a beast of a thing, tied in three places with baling twine and leaning into the field at an alarming angle. I studied it. And while I stood there, I saw something move from the corner of my eye. A dark figure was flitting up the farmhouse garden, racing towards the house. It disappeared around the corner leading to the yard and I heard a door bang. Sure that I was safe from the dogs, for no farmer’s wife alive would let them into her garden, I squeezed through the gap between the gatepost and the wall and crept closer. She had been hanging out washing; a basket of linen sat in the middle of the patch of grass and a pair of underdrawers hung by one leg where she had abandoned them. Rather a splendid garment for a sheep farmer’s wife, I thought, studying the satin waist-tape and the lace trim. And next to them on the line… I blinked.

‘Never,’ I said out loud. ‘Preposterous.’

For next along the clothes line to the splendid underdrawers was a bandeau brassiere in the same white linen with straps of the same satin tape and no Scottish farmer’s wife from Gretna Green to John o’ Groats could possibly possess such a thing. Not only was it a bandeau instead of a chemise, but a bandeau of a texture and outline that was positively…

‘Parisian,’ I said, and I was over the wall and round the corner before any thought of a collie with ice-pick teeth could stop me.

‘Mademoiselle Beauclerc?’ I called out, banging on the door she must have gone through. ‘Est-ce que vous êtes Mademoiselle Jeanne Beauclerc, la maîtresse?’ There was only silence. ‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I called out again in an even louder voice, and this time I tried the handle. I heard the creak of a floorboard first and then saw a shadow behind the muslin of an open upstairs window.

‘Who is this, please?’ said a timid voice.

‘A friend,’ I said. ‘An old friend of Fleur Lipscott and a friend of yours, too, if I can be of any assistance.’

The shadow moved again and at last she came into plain view, a pale young woman dressed in black.

‘You came over the fields?’ she said.

‘From the headlands, yes,’ I answered. ‘Miss Beauclerc, is it you?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And you say Fleur sent you?’

‘Perhaps you could come down,’ I said. ‘Or could I come in? I feel a bit like Romeo calling up to your window like this. It never seemed to me to be conducive to a proper discussion.’

She moved away from the window and from deep inside the house – Scotch farmhouses are extremely solid – I could hear the faint sounds of movement, receding along an upstairs passage, advancing down a staircase and then approaching a door near where I was standing. Bolts were drawn, keys turned and at last it opened.

‘Where is it?’ said Jeanne Beauclerc, looking past me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Didn’t you bring my luggage? Is Fleur bringing it? Are you coming too?’

‘If I could just come in,’ I said again and she drew back against the passage wall to let me enter. At the end of the passage, facing the sea view, was a sitting room of comfortable armchairs, reading lamps and low tables and from the walking guides, touring maps and picture magazines fanned out upon these tables I quickly surmised that this was the residents’ lounge for Low Merrick’s paying guests.

‘So,’ I said, perching on the arm of a chair, ‘when you left St Columba’s last week you came here?’

‘And Fleur was supposed to pack a few things for me,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘If she could get away. But here I am with one change of linen and my toothbrush waiting and waiting and you haven’t brought so much as a spare nightgown. And I can’t stay here much longer.’

‘Why not?’ I said, puzzled by her air of grievance. Surely she did not mean to suggest that she was above the simple comforts of this pleasant farmhouse. ‘Paying guests are quite the norm here, aren’t they?’

She frowned and shook her hair back. She wore it in long loose curls, like a child.

‘Mrs Paterson tells me she needs my room at the end of the week, for Parents’ Day at the school. And they do not like keeping it secret that I am here. I shall not be sorry to go.’

‘Why did you come here?’ I said.

‘We chose this place because it was right on the other side of the town from Miss Shanks but near enough to walk to, and very quiet. Hah! Quiet! First came the police and then a very strange young man – but I got rid of him.’

‘I heard,’ I said drily. ‘Where are the dogs today?’

She ignored the question and the reprimand, although she had the good grace to blush a little.

‘And now you!’ she cried. ‘What is happening?’

‘Might one ask why you and Fleur were running away?’ I said. ‘In the middle of term, like two schoolgirls instead of two mistresses?’

‘Hasn’t Fleur told you?’ said Miss Beauclerc, warily.

‘Fleur, I’m afraid to relate, is gone,’ I said. ‘She left on Saturday.’

Miss Beauclerc was silent for a full minute, the blood draining from her face and her eyes widening and widening until I could see the whites all around. When she spoke again her voice was ragged.

‘She left without me? She took her things and sailed away? Without me?’

‘Sailed?’ I echoed.

‘Oui,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘This was our plan. We were to hire a little boat on Saturday, smuggle our things into it overnight – pretend to be ill and miss church if we needed more time – and set sail tonight on the tide. We even thought we might throw some of our clothes over the side to wash up and maybe people would think we had drowned and never look for us.’

‘A boat,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ The police had asked about trains and ferries and taxis, had even asked fishermen if they had had a passenger. They had dragged their minds into the twentieth century enough to ask at the garage if a young lady had hired a motorcar but it had never occurred to them to think that Fleur might have hoisted the mainsail of a little boat and taken herself away across the sea.

The worst of it was that, while one could forgive them – the police force of a small and traditional town where such modernity was unknown – I did not know how I was ever to forgive myself. I, who knew all too well of Fleur’s love of boats and the sea, who had watched her playing at sailing ships in the lake and had read in Pearl’s letters through the years that followed all about how marvellous Fleur had been crewing for this or that friend in some race or other. Even that summer when she was a baby of seven she had sat imperiously on her sandcastle that day at Watchet, a chicken leg in one hand and a spyglass in the other, watching the yachts out in the bay and regaling us all in her precocious way with where each crew had got its trim wrong and how differently she would have managed things if she were the skipper.

‘I’d have shaved a good few minutes off that blue one’s time, I can tell you,’ she had said, taking her glass away from her eye and trying to spit out the mouthful of hair that had blown in before she took another bite of chicken. ‘They don’t have the first idea what she can do.’ She tore a strip of chicken meat away from the bone with her teeth and put the glass back to her eye. ‘A waste of a good wind, if you ask me.’

For the rest of the day, Aurora and Pearl took to calling her ‘Cap’n Bligh’ until Fleur pointed out with great dignity that Captain Bligh was a naval officer who would not have known a tiller from a teapot, and if they had to call her something of the like she thought Francis Drake was more of a sailor any day.

‘Why did she go without me?’ said Miss Beauclerc, bringing me out of my memories. ‘And what am I to do now?’

‘Well, if we’re picking things over,’ I said, ‘why did you leave early and come to the Patersons’? If you were all set for today why did you bolt a week early?’

‘I couldn’t stay,’ said Miss Beauclerc, not helpfully. She had bowed her head and muttered the words as though ashamed of them.

‘Were you sacked?’

‘No, I was not,’ she said. ‘I could not stay another minute in that place.’

‘Yes, but why?’ I said.

‘How much do you know?’ she asked. ‘You said you are an old friend of Fleur’s?’

‘I know nothing about your business,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know why Fleur left. I don’t even know why Fleur came.’

‘She came, as did I, because Miss Fielding was a wonderful, kind, compassionate and understanding person. Sadly deceived, too innocent and trusting to see what sort of woman she had fallen in with.’

‘Miss Shanks,’ I said.

‘And so we decided to leave, Fleur and me,’ said Miss Beauclerc.

‘Just like Miss Blair and Miss Taylor and Miss Bell before you,’ I said.

‘Not the same thing at all. They were sacked. They were the lucky ones. We had to rip ourselves away and we knew that life would never be the same again. We did not care, we each had one true friend… Or I thought I did. I do not understand why she abandoned me.’

‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I can strike a bargain with you, Miss Beauclerc. You tell me what Ivy Shanks did to you and Fleur and I’ll fetch your things and arrange some mode of transport to take you away. What do you say to that?’

‘I say no thank you,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘And I ask what sort of woman would bargain with me instead of just helping me.’ I flushed then, for to hear it put that way was pretty shaming.

‘The thing is, mademoiselle, that a woman’s body washed up-’

‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘The policeman told Mrs Paterson, when he came. And Mrs Paterson said the man I saw off with the dogs had been talking about her to all the neighbours too.’

‘And so I need to be sure that you know nothing about how she died before I could possibly think of helping you get away.’

‘I?’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘Why should I know anything about some poor drowned woman? I can tell you how it feels to seek that way out of life’s cares, because I came close to it myself. Had it not been for Fleur I should have washed up somewhere with my face all nibbled and seaweed in my hair.’

‘Did the police tell you that?’ I said, sharply.

‘They told Mrs Paterson, and she took great delight in telling me. But that is all I know and I can’t understand why you would suspect me.’

‘Just seems odd, that’s all,’ I said, rather lamely. ‘You’ve run away to here and the police think that the body might have gone in from here.’

‘And who is this woman I have killed for no reason?’ she said. ‘The wicked creature of depravity that I am.’ She was getting very angry and yet, and yet, as I looked at her, her cheeks flushed and her eyes flashing, it was not offended innocence that I saw but something else entirely. And it occurred to me that no one running away in the night and shoving her belongings overboard in hopes of being thought drowned could be all that innocent anyway. She had maligned Miss Shanks but offered no details and although I too found the woman odd it could not be disputed that she was steering a very successful girls’ school through a stormy passage with sackings, deaths and resignations threatening to capsize the vessel at every turn.

‘No one knows who the body is,’ I said. ‘Fleur went to see and Miss Barclay did too and neither of them knew the woman.’

‘And so why would you think she is anything to do with me?’ said Miss Beauclerc.

‘No reason at all,’ I answered. ‘Just that rather a lot has happened since I arrived, leaving no time to sort it all out and think it through.’

‘Since you arrived where?’ she asked me. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

‘I’m the new English mistress at St Columba’s,’ I said. ‘Now that Fleur is gone.’

‘And did Miss Shanks appoint you?’

‘Sort of. Pretty much,’ I said.

‘Then you should be very careful,’ she said. ‘It must look like a lifeline to you just now. It isn’t, believe me.’

‘I’m going to ask you one last time, Mademoiselle Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘And then of course I shall fetch your things and bring them here to you whether you answer me or not. I’m not a monster. Now, once and for all, why did you leave St Columba’s?’

‘Because it is a place of great wickedness and it would have corrupted me to stay.’ She must have known this was worse than useless to me, heavy on drama (and delivered most flamboyantly too, I must say) but lacking any actual content. Her voice softened a little as she went on. ‘Fleur was happy here for five years and asked me to join her. I had one wonderful year with her and with Miss Fielding and the Misses Taylor and Bell too. But afterwards… We could not leave in the usual way – Miss Shanks’s contracts are very binding – so we decided to leave in an unusual way.’

‘But you bolted,’ I said. ‘And then Fleur bolted. And Fleur left you stranded.’

‘And then you came and now you will help me.’

‘And where will you go?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Beauclerc. She did not wring her hands exactly but she clasped them together so hard that her fingers whitened. ‘We were supposed to go away to Fleur’s home.’

Of course, I thought. Pereford. Where else would she go? There had been times in my own life when I had dreamed of going back to Pereford for succour, and I had never really lived there.

‘But I can’t go there without her, can I?’ Miss Beauclerc was saying. ‘I have no money left and no family who will own me. I – I – I…’

I would love to report that what I said next sprang from pity for her, so far from home, friendless and without a change of clothes, sitting there hunched in her chair and staring at an impossible future of lonely destitution. Honesty forces me to admit, however, that I wanted her safely stashed where I could easily find her again. It was out of my mouth before I could catch it and swallow.

‘If I bring your things this evening can you catch a late train?’ She started to interrupt me. ‘And you can go to Perthshire. To my home. And stay there until things here…’

‘Be a guest?’ she said. ‘In your home?’

Belatedly, my common sense began to rumble into gear as I imagined what Hugh would make of me sending strangers – nay, foreigners – to live in his house while I was out of it.

‘Can you sew?’ I said. ‘Or anything? You could help my maid, Grant. She’d love to quiz an honest-to-goodness Frenchwoman on the subject of clothes.’

Miss Beauclerc drew herself up a little and her voice shook as she answered me.

‘You think of me as a servant?’ she said. ‘Or worse, possibly a servant, if I can tell you that I am able to sew?’

‘You’re a working woman,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see why you should take it that way.’

‘My family,’ said Miss Beauclerc, ‘is of the most ancient and exalted line. The Beauclercs have been in the Dauphiné since-’

‘But they, my dear mademoiselle, have disowned you,’ I said. ‘And you were a schoolteacher, which is not so different from a governess, who is almost a servant. I’m sorry my suggestion offended you and I withdraw it.’

‘I am a scholar,’ she said. ‘I have a degree, from Grenoble. I wrote an article published in the-’

‘I am offering refuge, Miss Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘If you cannot sew then my maid and my husband will both wonder what you are doing there. I’ve done it myself before now, you know. Pretended to be a servant to earn my place in a household where I needed to be.’

She stared at me and breathed rather hard while she thought it through.

‘I can sew,’ she said at last. ‘And I can embroider too and even make lace, if I have to. Thank you.’

One did not wear much in the way of embroidery any more, thankfully, but if that was her handiwork pegged out in the farmhouse garden then her place in Grant’s heart was assured, for my maid deplored modern, factory-sewn underclothes above all things and her distress at my thrift in banning the beautiful garments I used to order by the dozen before the war had been piercing. They had been made by silent nuns somewhere in the Alps, and if my geography were not deserting me Grenoble was near enough the Alps to put a smile on Grant’s face that might last until Christmas.

‘I shall return after nightfall with your luggage,’ I said, ‘if you’ll tell me where you think it might be.’

On my way back to St Columba’s again I stopped at the harbour and shook my head in shame to see the little hut with its painted sign: Fishing & touring boats for hire. By the hour & by the day. Enquire within.

Knocking on the door, I roused an ancient mariner with a leathery purple complexion and a demeanour which made the driver of the railway station dog-cart appear like the doorman at the Savoy.

‘Aye?’ he barked at me from around his pipe, glaring out of small, red, swimming eyes. ‘What do ye want? I’m in no mood for women today.’

‘A question for you,’ I said, taking a step back away from the combined exhalation of tobacco and whisky. ‘Did you rent a boat to a young lady on Saturday past?’

‘Aye!’ he bellowed, bridging the distance between my nose and the fumes. ‘And if you’ve come wi’ a pack o’ excuses fae the besom, ye’ll can get straight back and tell ’er fae me that she’s a wee b-’

‘Before you say something you might come to regret,’ I said, ‘let me assure you I have no idea where the lady went to and I had no advance notice that she was going to steal your boat.’ My plain speaking mollified him somewhat, and his next speech was grunted rather than boomed.

‘One pound ten shillings and sixpence she paid me,’ he said. ‘And she owes me another fifteen guineas b’now.’

‘That seems a little steep for a week’s boat rental,’ I said.

‘That’s a fine, no’ the rent,’ he said.

‘Have you reported the matter to the police?’ I asked. ‘Or the coastguard?’

‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘Well, no’ just yet, like.’ Which I took to mean that he feared a report would lead to a return and the mounting fine would then stop accruing. He preferred, I surmised, to fester and whinge and think of the total growing greater every day.

‘I take it you had a proper contract?’ I said. He nodded. ‘Might I see it?’ He nodded again and, reaching behind him into the hut, he unhooked a board from a nail beside the door and showed it to me.

There on the yellow form, as large as life, was her signature: F.D. Lipscott. While I stared at it, a crabbed and yellowed finger threaded in under my arm and tapped the form, the thick black nail – hideous to behold – like a scarab.

‘Late fees,’ he said. ‘All set oot there and she’s got a copy o’ it.’

‘Nevertheless I think you should tell the coastguard,’ I said. ‘And the local bobbies too.’ I thrilled to think of Sergeant Turner’s blush when he realised as I had that Fleur had got clean away from under our noses and that all the jostling boats in the harbour, their chugging engines, the snap of the dinghies’ sails and the clink of the painters had not jogged our brains at all in two long days.