Bothersome Number of Corpses

8

‘You are a brick, Miss Gilver,’ said a guileless child by the name of Jessie or Tessie or possibly Bessie, over dinner. ‘I’ve had the most enormous crush on Rob Roy Macgregor since I was a tiny child.’

‘How can you have a crush on someone in a book?’ said another. There were general snorts of derision from all around her and one dainty little miss went as far as to roll up a piece of bread into a missile and throw it at her.

‘Petra lives for chemistry,’ one of them explained to me. ‘She’d only have a pash for-’

‘Mendel,’ said a child at the end of the table, provoking gales of laughter. Petra was unperturbed.

‘Gregor Mendel was a biologist,’ she said. ‘You mean Mendeleev. Now, the fascinating thing about Mendeleev-’

‘Oh, shut up!’ said Bessie or Nessie, as Petra underwent another hail of bread pellets.

‘Girls, really,’ I said, a little too mildly and a little too late. I was watching out of the corner of my eye in case one of the real mistresses were about to storm over and effect a coup.

I had decided I could not justify more time spent on the sixth formers, who had told me all they were ever going to, and I had swapped places with Miss Christopher. These little ones, however, were so much more boisterous at table than they had been in the classroom and so very much more boisterous than Stella and her crew, unfettered as they were by any desire to be thought languid, that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. And we were only at the soup.

‘I like David Copperfield,’ said another.

‘Or George IV,’ said the first bread thrower. ‘From that history book The Maid used to use. He always seemed like great fun.’

‘Ugh! Angela, you’re horrid even to say it as a joke. George IV with all that clay in his hair and never bathing. You’d be sick.’

‘Girls, really, please,’ I said. ‘No more talk of pashes and crushes.’ Was I ever this frivolous, I wondered? Certainly not in front of grown-ups.

‘Oh, Miss Gilver, don’t get like Juliet!’ said Petra. ‘All that great sweep of literature and she wouldn’t let us read a word that would give her broken heart a pang.’

‘Silly little girls,’ I said. I drank some soup and while I did their words caught up with me. ‘What broken heart?’

‘Oh Romeo, Romeo!’ said a pair of them in chorus. ‘Of course she had a broken heart. She displayed all the symptoms – solitary walks, pale cheeks, endless trips to church even when there wasn’t a service. We think he must have died, don’t we, girls? She was too woebegone for someone who’d been jilted.’

‘Stop it, you dreadful children,’ I said. Of course, the exasperation was all an act; I could not wait for dinner to be over and for Alec’s expected telephone call to ask him what he thought of the theory. Slowly, I became aware that the girls were giggling in that stifled way which only produces more giggling than if they had let their laughter go. Clearly they could tell that I was thinking over their words in a most undignified way.

‘You think we’re right, don’t you, Miss Gilver?’ said one.

‘Enough!’ I said. ‘On pain of Silas Marner, you are not to talk in that disrespectful way of Miss Lipscott any more.’

‘In your hearing, Miss Gilver?’ said Petra. ‘Or at all?’

‘At all, you little monkey,’ I said. ‘I’m putting you on your honour.’ And it was wonderful to see how this subdued them. How long would it last that their untarnished honour was as a line drawn, uncrossable, in the sand? I hoped for some of them it would endure their whole lives through.

There was time before Alec’s scheduled call for a short trip to the little flower room downstairs where Jeanne Beauclerc had told me the mistresses kept their luggage. I had my own suitcase as my excuse for wandering, but it did not take long for me to realise there was no way I could manhandle it down the stairs on my own. (A new-found respect was born in me for Grant, far from hefty, who threw the thing around like a beach ball, and for all the station boys and elderly porters who had shouldered cases and trunks in and out of boots and guards’ vans, full of clothes, in my travelling years.) I dragged it back to my room and set off with a hatbox and my overnight case instead, worrying a little about how I would manage Miss Beauclerc’s suitcase if it were as large as my own.

Unfortunately I was only ten paces from my door when I was waylaid.

‘Miss Gilver?’ It was one of the maids. She bobbed and then stared at my bags.

‘I was just looking for somewhere to put these where they won’t be in my way,’ I said.

‘The mistresses don’t put their bags in the attic, Miss Gilver,’ she said, and before I could stop her she took the bags out of my hands. ‘You wouldn’t believe the pandemonium at the end of term and a nice leather case like that would get scuffed away to bits in the scrum, for sure.’ She was retreating and I sped after her. She had reached the head of a small casement staircase and shot down it with the light steps of youth and daily practice. I shot down after her, tense with the knowledge of my greater years, greater weight and lack of acquaintance with what characterful traits this stairway might have to its name.

‘The mistresses keep their cases in the wee luggage room by the side door that used to be the flower room,’ she called over her shoulder, as she descended. ‘Nicer for them not to be jostled in with the girls.’

‘Ah, I see,’ I said. The stair spat us out in a corridor of the ground floor I had not encountered before, somewhere in the kitchen wing at my best guess, and the little maid barrelled along it at the most amazing speed. If she had been up since six scrubbing and sweeping, her energy at seven in the evening was a thing of wonder.

‘You don’t need to come, Miss Gilver,’ she said, showing a concern for the elders of St Columba’s that I had not seen before.

‘Well, yes, but just in case I need to lay hands on it,’ I replied. ‘Best if I know where things are. That hatbox still has the hat inside, for instance – nowhere better to keep it, don’t you know, but I might need it for Parents’ Day.’

‘Oh, uh-huh?’ said the maid. I could not be sure if she were being politely interested in my remarks or if they had raised suspicions in her.

‘It’s rather swish, if I say it myself,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know the form, you know? Wouldn’t like to upstage the mothers or the headmistress or anything.’

She gave a longing look at the hatbox in her hand, perhaps taken with the idea of a swish hat (for while maids seldom have the means of acquiring much finery nor the occasions which call for it, that does not mean they feel any less the desire, as witness Grant’s frustrated attempts to indulge it vicariously through endlessly disappointing me).

‘Here we are,’ said the girl, turning into a room at a bend in the passageway. ‘It’s not locked, since everything’s empty that’s stored in here.’

There were many trunks around the walls, and several hatboxes and small cases on the slatted wooden shelves where once flower bulbs might have been set to dry over winter. In fact, I could not immediately see where on the shelves I could squeeze my bags in.

‘I’ll just stack them up a wee bit and make some space,’ said the maid. ‘There’s no need for this lot to be all set out in a row… That’s funny.’ She was tugging at a small case on a low shelf. ‘It’s kind of heavy.’ I bent to see.

There were two stout cases side by side, strapped shut, and two small bags wrapped in mackintoshed cloth as though to withstand more weather than their manufacturer had had in mind. Weather, I thought, or possibly sea spray. Did all four belong to Miss Beauclerc? It was possible, and yet there was a symmetry and neat modesty about the two large cases and the two small bags which put me in mind of lockers and bunks and sailors’ duffel bags, and of the smallness of Hugh’s army kit when he went away to war.

If there were any further doubt in my mind the maid removed it.

‘Thon’s Miss Lipscott’s bag,’ she said, pointing to one of the two larger cases. ‘And this other one’s Mam-wazell B’s. She’s a proper lady like yourself, miss, and she’s got the most beautiful things. I’d know her bags anywhere.’ She put her hands up to the sides of her face and turned to me.

‘Miss?’ she said. ‘They said that poor soul that fell in the sea was a stranger.’

‘She was,’ I said.

‘But there’s their traps. Both o’ them. Where have they gone with none of their things, miss?’

‘The body,’ I said, ‘can’t have been Miss Lipscott, for I was there when she went to look at it. The body was dead by Wednesday at the very latest. And Miss Lipscott was here until Saturday morning.’

‘But Mam-wazell!’ said the girl. She kept looking back at the cases and her teeth were beginning to chatter.

‘It wasn’t Mademoiselle Beauclerc,’ I said, firmly, wishing I could tell her (but knowing I dared not) whence the firmness sprang. ‘That poor dead woman was nothing to do with St Columba’s at all.’ The girl looked at me with a great deal of troubled doubt in her young eyes. ‘Trust me,’ I said, hoping that I was to be trusted. For even though No. 5 predated Fleur’s departure, I had seen Jeanne Beauclerc with my own eyes and Miss Blair was apparently bringing cricket to the schoolgirls of North Yorkshire, there were still two mistresses unaccounted for. And if it were too much of a stretch to imagine that Miss Taylor or Miss Bell had revisited her old stamping ground and been drowned there, there was still a world of other ways the body could have something to do with the school. In fact, it offended all reason to think it did not have something to do with the school. For starters, as my sons were wont to say, there were women who dressed plainly in dark garments and went about their lives unprotected by husbands and here was a woman’s body dressed plainly in dark garments which seemed not to have any abandoned husband searching for it. Besides that, the headmistress (of a school I had heard called evil and corrupting) had immediately thought when she heard of the body that it was one of her girls or one of her staff. Not to mention the fact that a mistress had taken one look at the thing and promptly fled, leaving her plans, her friend and her very luggage behind her. There had to be a connection somewhere, even if I was without the merest hint of what it might be.

‘No,’ I said again. ‘Nothing to do with St Columba’s. Now, what’s your name, my girl?’

‘Maureen,’ said the maid.

‘Well, Maureen, you run along and don’t give these bags another thought. I’ll take care of getting them sent on after Miss Lipscott and Miss Beauclerc. And Maureen? Best not mention them to anyone, eh? It is a bit odd and we don’t want to cause a lot of worry.’

There was no way of knowing whether she would heed my words or scurry back to her bedroom to regale the rest of the maids with the news. She bobbed silently, still looking anxious, and was gone, leaving my hatbox and case in the doorway and leaving me the problem of just how this ‘taking care’ was to be effected.

What I wanted to do was wrest open Fleur’s bags with a chisel to see if they yielded any clues as to where she had gone but, thinking calmly, I could see that if her plans had changed to the extent that her bags had been abandoned in the flower room this way her destination might well have changed too. What I should do, of course, what honour bound me to do, was take Miss Beauclerc’s bags to her as I had promised.

The sound of a door opening somewhere close by in the house jogged me at last into action. What I could not do was stand here staring at the luggage, waiting for someone to find me. I shoved my own bags onto a low shelf and grabbed those I judged to be Jeanne Beauclerc’s – they were indeed of very buttery pigskin and had her initials, rather an impressive string of them, tooled in gilt (somewhat vulgar, but then perhaps they did things differently in the Dauphiné). Taking them with me, I shut the door on Fleur’s. They had sat there undisturbed for two days and two nights and there was no reason not to think they would sit there a little longer. I would take these to Low Merrick Farm, return for the other two, smuggle them to safety and ransack them at my leisure.

I made it almost all the way to my room to fetch my outdoor things before my plan started to unravel. The corridors were quiet, all the girls at rest, I supposed, and all the mistresses hard at work in their studies as usual, and in the echoing silence it was impossible not to hear the cry when it began.

‘Miss Gilver! Miss Giiiiilverrrrr…’

It sounded like Ivy Shanks, that peculiar playful way the words were sung out that made me think of the big bad wolf and his sing-song call of ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ I looked desperately around for some curtained niche or blanket chest where I could shove the bags, and seeing nothing I stepped lightly up the nearest stairway.

‘Miiissss Giiil-verrrrr!’ sang Miss Shanks’s voice again.

Making no effort to be quiet this time I turned around and came back down the stairs.

‘Miss Shanks?’ I said, stopping a few steps from the landing and peering down. ‘Did you need me?’

‘Ah, there you are!’ said Miss Shanks, tripping along to the bottom of the steps to meet me. ‘What are you doing up there?’

‘I was taking these to the attics,’ I answered, indicating the bags and trying not to look like a liar. ‘I won’t be a tick.’

To my immense relief, Miss Shanks gave my burden barely a glance, but just wound her arm round and round as though reeling me in on it and started walking back the way she had come.

‘Leave them just now, Miss Gilver, you’re wanted on the telephone.’

‘I see,’ I said, hurrying after her. ‘I’ll just…’ I opened my door on the way past and practically threw the bags inside. ‘Thank you for coming to fetch me, Headmistress. Is it… Did the caller say…?’ A sudden enormous worry had bloomed in me like ink dropped into water that if Miss Shanks herself had run to find me, perhaps it was a telephone call of grave import. Perhaps it was Hugh. Perhaps one of the boys was in trouble. I did not quite like to mention my husband and sons out of the blue to a woman so deep in the fiction of my spinsterhood that she seemed to have forgotten it was not true.

‘It’s that nice young man of yours,’ said Miss Shanks with a twinkling look over her shoulder. ‘Can’t take himself off to his bed without the sound of your voice.’ She grabbed the handle and threw her office door wide.

‘There ye are, make yourself at home and I’ll wait in the staffroom.’ She beamed at me, shooed me inside and closed the door again.

‘Alec?’ I said, sitting down in the chair at the desk. It was an oak and leather affair, one leg and four little castored feet, and it was set very low to the floor for Miss Shanks’s short stature. I twirled it round and around a few times to make myself comfortable and by the time I had undone the ensuing tangle with the telephone cord, Alec had roused himself and was talking.

‘Dandy!’ he said. ‘What a day I’ve had. I hope that woman isn’t angry I rang you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t seem the least bit put out. She’s shown me into her own office and gone to camp out in the staffroom until I’m done. Now, listen, Alec.’

‘I found Blair,’ Alec said.

‘I found Beauclerc,’ I said, unable to resist it. There was a short silence.

‘We’ll get to you in a minute,’ Alec said, eventually. ‘I also found out something very interesting about Elf. His life, I mean. Not his death, exactly.’

‘He was Fleur’s lover?’ I said. ‘I thought as much.’

‘Well, aren’t you clever?’ said Alec, bitterly. ‘Fine. Tell me about Mademoiselle Beauclerc then.’

As succinctly as I could, for I instantly regretted taking the wind out of his sails that way, I related the discovery of Jeanne Beauclerc in the Patersons’ farmhouse, the tale of her and Fleur’s planned escape, the evidence of the rented boat never returned and the two sets of waterproofed luggage sitting in the flower room.

‘My word,’ said Alec, with the understatement he always affects when he is more impressed than he cares to admit. ‘At Low Merrick, eh? And you interviewed her.’

‘And found out precisely nothing,’ I reminded him. ‘She gave no hint about why she and Fleur were taking off, nor why she suddenly bolted almost a week early. She’s in a bit of a fix now, of course, but still admirably – well, lamentably – close-lipped about the whole thing. So, tell me, Alec, what do you think of this idea?’ Quickly I described my arrangement that she should travel to Gilverton and lie low there.

‘It would certainly be nice to have her safely stored until we can give her our full attention,’ he said.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ I said. ‘So that’s my miraculously reappearing mistress. How about yours?’

‘No, no,’ said Alec. ‘You carry on and tell me the rest. How did you guess about Elf?’ I could hear the rustle and click of pipery going on and knew that he was determined to cap me one way or another.

‘Well, I didn’t really until you hinted,’ I said. ‘I was just being a pest. Only the girls at supper did a lot of silly giggling about the idea that Fleur had a lost love – a dead lost love. Goodness knows how they cottoned on to it but they seemed pretty sure. That’s why they called her Juliet, apparently.’

‘Not a happy precedent,’ Alec said. ‘Right then, to me. I got to The Bridge House in time for tea – not that I was offered any, mind you. They viewed me as rather a fox in the hen coop, quite unlike St Columba’s. But Miss Blair came out to speak to me and we tramped around the playing fields in the freezing cold and driving rain for a while.’

‘And?’

‘And she was pretty forthcoming about life in Portpatrick, eventually,’ he said. ‘Oh, at first she tried to make out she had resigned, only she wouldn’t say over what, or why she had left in the middle of term or what possessed her to give up the fresh sea breezes for this moor and the hacking cough she has had since she got here. Eventually, though, as I say, she broke down – a chest infection is wonderfully weakening to the spirit – and vouchsafed to me that she had been sacked. Her eyes watered as she told me and I don’t think it was just from coughing.’

‘You are a meanie, Alec,’ I said. ‘You might have taken the poor woman to a tea shop if they wouldn’t let you inside the school.’

‘Tea shop?’ he cried. ‘Dandy, I don’t think you quite appreciate the scope of this moor. You might as well say I should have taken her to a bull fight or a cancan show. The North York Moor makes Perthshire look like Biarritz!’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘She was sacked. Why?’

‘I’m still shivering a little,’ Alec said, then at last he resumed the tale. ‘She didn’t know why. And I have to say I believe her. She was still very hurt and completely bewildered. She said she had known Miss Fielding from some place they had both worked at before and that Miss Fielding had written to ask her to join the staff of St Columba’s while it was still at the planning stage. All was well for five years or so and then Miss Fielding died. Before she was cold in her grave, Miss Blair said, Old Hammy Shanks had sacked her. Just told her her services were no longer required and could she push her key through the letter box as she was leaving. Along with a Miss Spittal who taught riding on a monthly contract, Miss Mount the swimming instructress who used to travel in from Stranraer in the summer term and a pair of sisters from Portpatrick village who took the little ones for ballet and taught the big ones a spot of waltz and rumba.’

‘And Miss Taylor and Miss Bell?’ I said.

‘They were still in post when she left,’ said Alec. ‘And since – quite understandably – she didn’t keep up a correspondence with a place which had used her so ill, she doesn’t know what became of them afterwards.’

‘And you think she’s being quite honest, you said?’

‘Oh yes indeed. She’s horrified by having been sacked, Dandy. A spotless record up until that point, apparently, and now she feels all tarnished and sullied and doesn’t want to make friends so that she never has to tell anyone. I felt quite sorry for her, in spite of everything.’

‘What everything?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Alec. ‘Cricket! And you should have seen the creature.’

‘Poor woman,’ I said. ‘We can’t all be… bathing beauties.’

‘Bathing…?’ said. Alec, laughing to mock me, but only a little. ‘The very thought of Miss Blair in a bathing suit!’

‘Speaking of bathing, though,’ I said. ‘It seems odd that a school would sack its swimming instructress and then build a new pool.’

‘Didn’t you say it was endowed or donated or whatever?’

‘But I think the parents just stump up the cash, don’t they? I don’t speak from experience, obviously. Doesn’t the school choose what to lash it out on?’

‘Anyway,’ said Alec, ‘so much for Miss Blair, alive and kicking and sacked in a very peremptory way in February of 1926. Not one of the four bodies, which four murders would have brought into play.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said.

‘Ah yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Speaking of which. Well, I left The Bridge House and shivered and shook in my rented motorcar all twenty godforsaken miles, reaching Goatland Priory just in time for drinks. And this time, I’m glad to say, I got one. They must be pretty desperate for visitors up here – welcomed me with open arms and barely a thought of who I was and why I had come here.’

‘Here?’ I said. ‘You’re still there?’

‘I am,’ said Alec. ‘Sitting in a lovely warm bedroom in front of a roaring apple-wood fire with an enormous brandy and a tummy full of mutton. I like Forrester, I must say.’

‘And was he as forthcoming with stories as he is with meat and drink?’ I said.

‘Not exactly,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve had to tell rather a lot of whoppers, in fact. So I’m going to make the most of my comfortable night, because once I go and they get a chance to discuss me with mutual acquaintances they’re never going to let me darken their door again.’

‘Go on,’ I said. We had a slight hiatus while the exchange confirmed another three minutes and then Alec resumed.

‘Well, I told them who I was, naturally. Thankfully Aurora wasn’t around at this point, just Forrester himself, his mother and an aunt who it turns out is a closer relation to the departed Elf than this branch – spot of luck, I thought. Anyway, we managed to find some names to fling back and forth – I was at school with the son of another aunt and one of this aunt’s husband’s sister’s children is married to a girl who was a bridesmaid at a wedding in Hampshire where I was a pageboy.’

‘God Almighty,’ I said.

‘I know, but it helped in the end to have them think they knew me. And yet the connection was so slight that I felt unencumbered when it came to concocting my history. I said I’d been visiting my daughter at The Bridge House – cue lots of chatter about what sort of place it was and I came out with my sorry little story that its chief attraction for Belinda, that’s my daughter, was that it was a long way from Dorset and a very long way from the sea. I said she had got a sort of a phobia for the sea since her mother drowned.’

‘Oh, Alec!’

‘And so they asked, as you would, whether it was a boating accident and I mumbled a bit about my wife always having been very unhappy and something about a brother lost in battle and a baby son who only lived a-’

‘Oh, Alec!’

‘And Forrester himself, as you can well imagine, couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. So he popped off to his office or somewhere and that was my cue to rouse myself from my pit of gloom and apologise with much hand-wringing about the unburdening. Couldn’t account for it, no idea why I suddenly let go in a rush. All that. And it was at that point that Mrs Forrester and Aunt Nadine – Mrs Walters – came over all maternal and rushed to assure me that these thing happen in the best of families – i.e. their own – and that’s when they told me about Elf.’

‘Where did you get the nerve?’ I asked him. ‘You just rolled up at the house, dropped into an armchair and started spouting about suicide!’

‘Hardly,’ said Alec. ‘I emptied my petrol tank out onto the moor and plodded up the drive with a five gallon can. And I put in a good two hours of work with the women talking about the school – very careful groundwork: you’d have marvelled at me.’

‘Oh, you can always get women talking about schools,’ I said. ‘It’s just like servants.’

‘The poor widower Osborne has had his troubles there, too,’ said Alec. ‘I really set to and wooed them. By the time they were telling me about Elf we were old friends, the three of us.’

‘And what about Elf?’

‘Yes, well, it was drowning with him too, if you remember.’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. ‘Now that you remind me.’

‘Off a cliff, on the coast, by Pereford. He had gone for a walk and I’ll give you one guess who with.’

‘No!’

‘Oh yes. They had been spending a great deal of time together that summer, lots of walking and rowing about in a little boat and there might even have been some poetry.’

‘Written?’

‘Not as bad as all that, I don’t think,’ Alec said. ‘Read out, though, in the rowing boat.’

‘Dear me.’

‘And so Elf’s mother – Mrs Franklin-’

‘Marigold,’ I said. ‘For her sins. I always felt a kinship.’

‘Anyway, Marigold did some Lady Bracknelling about, seeing what she thought of Fleur as a daughter-in-law. She didn’t go as far as to ban the nuptials, but she wasn’t too keen.’

‘Why not?

‘Just wait, Dandy,’ said Alec.

‘I know Fleur had a wildish spell after the war although I don’t know the details. But there were no babies and nothing in the papers and she had such a lot of money.’

‘All will be revealed,’ Alec said. ‘So this day Fleur came back to the house at Pereford without Elf and looking very white and strained and collapsed in a heap on the hall carpet.’

‘Marble,’ I said. ‘The carpets were rolled up and stored in the summertime.’

‘Poor girl, then,’ said Alec. ‘Anyway, as she was coming to, she said quite plainly in the hearing of Marigold Franklin, as well as Fleur’s own mother and sisters, that she had told Edward again and again that she wouldn’t marry him and that he just wouldn’t take no for an answer. And she said, “I’m so sorry,” and fluttered her eyes and that was it for four days.’

‘That was what?’

‘Catatonic shock, the doctors said. By the time she came round the second time Elf’s body had washed up and the inquest had been ordered and Fleur claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. Couldn’t remember the walk or coming back to the house and saying what she had. She stuck to that story like glue and wouldn’t budge. Her mother and sisters seemed to believe it and they closed ranks and wouldn’t let anyone – not Marigold, not Elf’s father, and certainly not the police – talk to her. They bundled her off to a nursing home and the Franklins seem to have taken the view that nothing would bring him back and that since the two families were already connected through Aurora and Drew (and their baby son) any scandal would end up tainting the whole lot of them, so they went along with the theory of an accident. Witnessed by Fleur, who was Elf’s betrothed and who had suffered some kind of hysterical amnesia from the shock of it.’

‘Golly,’ I said. ‘They really just told you all this?’

‘I told them my daughter witnessed my wife’s suicide and that I was a lonely widower despairing of an end to my solitude with this millstone of tragedy and shame around my neck. And I think there are a few Franklin nieces who’re in their thirties and looking set to wither on the vine.’

‘Alec, you do say the most hideous things sometimes.’

‘Here in Yorkshire,’ Alec said, ‘we call a spade a spade. And I’m a bit drunk too, I think. Anyway, I’m sure Aurora hasn’t told anyone in the household about the new chapter of scandal with Fleur. The ladies were speaking as though of ancient history.’

‘And where is Aurora?’ I said. ‘Has she dashed off to be with Fleur somewhere?’

‘Oh no, she’s here,’ Alec said. ‘She appeared for dinner. A slightly sticky moment when she heard my name and asked me if I was the Mr Osborne from Perthshire. I did a marvellous job of looking like someone who’d never heard of the place and then her own mother chimed in with ‘No, dear: Dorset’ and the moment passed. She’s not the shiniest button in the box, as you said yourself, and so she was quite placated with the story of my daughter at school nearby and seemed to settle on the idea that I’ve been here a lot and we might have run into one another at things with ponies. Her daughters, apparently, spend a great deal of time walloping around the heath on horseback and they meet the Bridge House girls all the time.’

‘Right.’ I was thinking back over all that he had told me. ‘All has not been revealed, though,’ I said at last. ‘Why did Marigold Franklin not want Fleur as a daughter-in-law when she looked into things, Bracknell-style? As you say, the two families were already connected.’

‘Because,’ said Alec and his voice had a drum roll in it, ‘simply because Fleur had been secretly engaged once before.’

‘So what?’

‘And the reason she hadn’t married – or even got as far as the engagement being announced – was that her then lover died before the wedding. In other words, he was No. 3.’

He waited.

‘Dan? Are you still there?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Too stunned to speak. I’ve never heard any of this.’

‘It was pretty successfully hushed up by the Lipscotts,’ Alec said. ‘But the Forrester-Franklin contingent – being in the family, as it were – were able to find out all about it. It happened in 1919. A car crash this time, although no one saw it happen. Fleur walked away from it and the fiancé was burned to a crisp.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘After which Fleur spent the late winter and spring in the usual nursing home and had only just got back to Pereford from that rest cure when the Franklins arrived for their ill-fated visit.’

‘And Fenella and Marigold just told you all this?’

‘Well, Marigold is a born gossip and she’s quite removed from the scandal really. Only a nephew married to a sister of the wicked girl.’

‘And Fenella?’

‘She’s getting on in years,’ Alec said.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked him, sincerely puzzled.

Alec cleared his throat.

‘It means I’m not entirely sure she understood just who I was,’ he said. ‘In fact, I rather think she took me for her late husband.’

‘Oh, Alec,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you really took advantage of a poor old lady wandered out of her wits! Goodness, it must have been years since I saw Fenella Forrester – it’s hard to imagine.’

‘It did her no harm,’ said Alec. ‘She was glad to see him, if anything; must have been a love match. And anyway in this case the ends more than justify the means. Three of them now, Dandy. The lover of 1919 makes three.’

‘And how will you set about learning any more of him?’ I said. ‘Can you winkle it out of the ladies? Is there anything that could get you started on a hunt through the newspapers? How many fatal car crashes can there have been in that year? If you were to restrict yourself to Dorset and London.’

‘Sh!’ said Alec. ‘Someone’s coming.’

I pressed the earpiece so hard against my head that my ear smarted from the pressure and I was rewarded with the sound, coming down the line, of a door being wrenched open and an angry voice, almost shouting.

‘Alec Osborne!’ the voice said. ‘Alexander Osborne! Yes, from Dorset, granted. But not any more. And you just marched in here and tricked my poor mother-in-law like a common con artist from the gutter.’

‘Is that Aurora?’ I asked, but Alec did not answer.

‘Mrs Forrester,’ he said and I had to strain very hard since he was no longer speaking towards the instrument. ‘What do you know about the young man of your sister’s who died in 1919? Not the one who died in 1920, you understand. The first one.’

‘Might not be the first one,’ I reminded him.

‘How dare you!’ said Aurora. Her voice was trembling with suppressed emotion. ‘We sacked you. You have no right to be asking these beastly questions.’

‘I’ll speak to her,’ I said.

‘Who are you talking to on that thing, anyway?’ Aurora said.

‘It’s Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘Would you like a word?’

‘She was our friend,’ Aurora said, sounding tearful now.

‘She still is,’ said Alec. ‘And so am I. We’re both trying to help.’

‘Get out,’ said Aurora. I could hear the muddled sounds of movement. ‘Get out of this house and don’t ever come back.’

‘You can’t throw me out onto the moor in the dead of night,’ said Alec. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! What will your husband say? I mean, I take it he knows nothing of this latest death?’

‘Shut up,’ said Aurora, collapsing into sobs. ‘And get out. My husband… My husband will chase you off with a shotgun if I tell him how you tricked us all.’ Alec came back to the mouthpiece and sighed down the line.

‘I’m not sure I believe her, Dan, but I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at the Horseshoe in Egton if you need me.’ He laid the earpiece down, without hanging up, and I could hear more movement and then silence. I waited. After a moment there were some swishing noises as someone moved closer and then Aurora’s voice came down the line.

‘Is anyone there?’

‘It’s me, darling,’ I said. ‘Alec told you.’

‘That was a rotten trick to play,’ she said. ‘Fenella doesn’t know who she’s talking to these days. What did she tell him?’

‘About Elf’s death, and about his predecessor.’

‘Oh, Dandy, it’s not how it seems, please believe me. Poor Elf and poor Charles and poor, poor darling Fleur. It’s not at all the way it must sound. And she’s been absolutely wonderful for years and years now.’

‘Yes, eight years is a good stretch,’ I said. ‘It held until last Tuesday or Wednesday and now there’s another corpse and Fleur’s disappeared again. Where’s this nursing home she usually goes to? Have you bundled her off there for a third time?’

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ said Aurora. ‘We don’t know where she is. You’ve no idea, Dandy, what we go through when we don’t know where she is, Mamma, Pearl and me.’

‘The truth will out, Aurora my dear,’ I said. To my surprise she snorted.

‘Hark at you, talking about “truth” like that,’ she said, ‘when both of you are just as twisty as corkscrews. I don’t think for a minute that you want to look after Fleur, any more than I believe Mr Osborne just happened to run out of petrol right by our front gate or that his wife killed herself jumping off a cliff. Why ever in the world he’s sent his daughter to school all the way up here, it wasn’t for that.’

I did not correct her. She would only have felt foolish and got even more angry. Instead, I rang off and immediately asked the exchange to put me through to the telegraph office.

‘“Name was Charles. Stop. Shiny Button told me. Stop,”’ said the operator. ‘Have I got that right?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Osborne at the Horseshoe Inn, Egton Bridge, Yorkshire, please.’

Surely there cannot have been too many young men called Charles who had died in crashes in 1919, I thought, hanging up again. In fact, I almost fancied there was a faint memory stirring in me at the thought of it. Alec would be able to turn up something in the morning if he could get to a newspaper office or a library somewhere.

As for me, I had go to Paterson’s farm again and take Miss Beauclerc her things. Then, I supposed, I should have to forewarn Hugh of her arrival. In fact – I looked at the telephone sitting there on Ivy Shanks’s desk – since I was right here…

‘Gilverton, Perthshire,’ I said to the woman on the exchange and then, ‘It’s me, Pallister,’ when the telephone was answered. I could picture him standing in the passageway just our side of the green baize door and glaring down his nose at the mouthpiece. Pallister does not approve of telephones, or of his mistress, either, these days.

‘Madam,’ he replied.

‘Is my husband there?’

‘Of course, madam,’ he said with affected surprise (the point being that decent people were all blamelessly at home, and only the very depraved were ringing from goodness knows where). ‘I shall alert Master and have him pick up the telephone in the billiards room.’

‘Who’s there?’ I asked Hugh when he answered a few minutes later, for he never practises billiards alone and so is only ever in the room when there is someone to challenge to a game or two.

‘Ah, Donald,’ he said.

I sat up very straight, very fast, in Miss Shanks’s chair, causing it to catch me in the small of the back as it tipped forward.

‘Good God, he’s been expelled!’ I said. ‘What for? What did he do?’

‘Marvellous that you have such faith in the boy, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘He has a weekend pass for the half-holiday and decided to come home.’

‘Right,’ I said. I had forgotten it was half-term time even as the rumblings about Parents’ Day at St Columba’s reminded me. ‘He’ll spend it all on trains but for a day,’ I went on, blustering a little from shame over my outburst. ‘What about Teddy?’

‘Thankfully he’s been invited out with a friend,’ said Hugh. ‘Sewell. So you have no reason to be feeling guilty.’

I had not been, to be honest, and resented the veiled implication that I should. All the same I would send a letter and a ten shilling note to the Sewells; I knew that Teddy would rather have a tip than a visit from me any day.

‘Now then, Hugh,’ I said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘I should say you do,’ said Hugh very drily. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand but I could still hear him talking to Donald. ‘Could you run along and fetch my diary from my business room desk, old chap? Thank you.’ I rolled my eyes; Hugh only old chaps the boys when he is trying (sometimes quite ostentatiously) to look like the perfect parent in comparison with me. ‘I’ve had the most extraordinary letter, Dandy.’

‘Who from?’ I asked.

‘From whom is a question I cannot answer,’ Hugh said. I did not miss the little dig at my grammar, but I rose above it.

‘Illegible signature?’

‘Anonymous,’ said Hugh. ‘Asked me to reply by return to a poste restante. Like a penny dreadful.’

‘What does it say?’

‘It tells me nothing I did not already know,’ he replied. ‘That you are living there (Portpatrick, one surmises) with a man who is not me and passing yourself off as-’

‘I am not!’ I said. ‘We stayed in the same pub in separate rooms for one night and since then I’ve been living at the girls’ school.’

‘Passing yourself off as a schoolmistress,’ he finished. ‘Miss Gilver.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘I know exactly who sent it. “Here” is the Crown and it was written by a very nosy and thoroughly unpleasant woman who’s holidaying there also with her companion. She witnessed Alec and me doing such shocking things as eating breakfast and standing on the street talking. Throw it on the fire, Hugh, and forget about it.’

‘I threw it on the fire within a minute of opening it,’ Hugh said. ‘Revolting thing.’

‘And it’s nothing to do with what I have to tell you anyway. The thing is, you see, that someone is coming to stay. At Gilverton. Probably tomorrow.’

‘Someone we know?’ said Hugh. There was an ominous note in his voice which I ignored.

‘No, a stranger,’ I said. ‘A Frenchwoman by the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc. One of the Dauphiné Beauclercs.’

‘The who?’

‘She’s actually been working as a French mistress here at St Columba’s.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh Hugh – the school where I’m working on the case. You never listen.’

‘Convent school, is it?’ said Hugh, the mention of a saint clearly setting all sorts of alarm bells ringing.

‘Perfectly ordinary girls’ school, chapel is the local kirk,’ I said. ‘In fact Basil Rowe-Issing’s girl is here. And one of the Norton daughters too. I had her reading Macbeth this morning. Anyway, I had thought Mademoiselle Beauclerc could have a bed in the servants’ wing and help Grant but those attic rooms are horribly draughty. She could always go to Dunelgar instead. Or she could go to Benachally and look at the hangings. She said she could embroider like anything.’

‘And is she in hiding from the police, might one ask?’ said Hugh. ‘Or is there more likely to be a ne’er-do-well hot-footing it after her?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘She needs somewhere to be, out of the way, while matters settle.’

‘While matters settle,’ he repeated. ‘Very well, Dandy. Tell me when she’s arriving and I’ll send the car. If some old French nun can fix those hangings without it costing us, I should be perfectly happy to put her up for a while.’

‘It’s not a convent,’ I said again. ‘And I’ve never asked but judging by appearance I’d say Mademoiselle was about twenty-five.’

There was a short silence, whose source and whose journey I could not fathom.

‘She’ll be able to walk from the station then,’ said Hugh.

I did not answer for I was thinking not about Jeanne Beauclerc walking from the station but about me trying to find the farm track again; thick clouds had turned this May evening as dark as December and the wind was blowing hard. On the other hand, I could hardly leave her thinking she had been abandoned a second time. On a third hand, my luck in being left alone to make these telephone calls was surely running out by now. ‘Can I ask you a favour, Hugh?’ I said at last.

‘You may,’ Hugh said, annoyingly.

‘Could you ring her up and tell her she can’t have her luggage tonight? It’s the wilds of nowhere where she’s staying, and Alec’s away. If you could just ring up Paterson of Low Merrick Farm, Portpatrick and tell Mademoiselle Beauclerc that I’ll bring her bags before breakfast tomorrow and that she should get herself to the station and take the train to Dunkeld-’

‘Why don’t you just take her stuff to the station?’ interrupted Hugh.

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Thank you, dear.’

‘Seems like the obvious thing to me,’ he said, milking his little triumph now. ‘My goodness, Dandy, if that’s an example of your canny detective’s brain at work! I daresay the whole puzzle isn’t really all that puzzling at all if you had a methodical mind tackling it.’

‘You don’t know the first thing about the case!’ I said.

‘Precisely my point,’ said Hugh.

‘There have been five murders,’ I said.

‘Since Friday?’ He sounded suitably astonished.

‘No, one last Tuesday or Wednesday and two more in the preceding decade.’

‘That’s not five, my dear Dandy,’ he said.

‘And there are five missing persons,’ I said, flushing but ignoring him. ‘Well, actually we’ve found two. But lost another one. And actually another. Yes, five.’

‘Perhaps I should come down there and sort it all out for you,’ he said, in a condescending tone that made me wish he were there so I could kick him.

Finally, I settled the telephone back in its cradle for the night and rubbed my ear hard with the heel of my hand. Then I twirled Miss Shanks’s chair back around to its usual setting and stood to leave.

Coming round the desk, though, I spied something upon the carpet just inside the door which certainly had not been there when I had entered and sat down.

A note, a folded piece of lined paper torn from a jotter. Written in pencil on its outside: Miss. Now, obviously Miss was Miss Shanks, for this was her office; and just as obviously there was no justification in the world for looking at a letter – even one not inside an envelope – addressed, however cryptically, to another person. (Indeed it had been one of the lessons most fiercely drummed into me by my mother and Nanny Palmer, working for once in tandem, that personal letters never were sealed into their envelopes. I had thought as a child that that was to show how much one trusted one’s servants and the Post Office employees and the servants of whoever one was writing to. It was only later that I twigged: one never sealed a letter for to do so was to imply that there were matters in one’s life unsuitable to be known by all.)

Be that as it may, I unfolded the sheet and read it quickly. Ivy Shanks’s life certainly had matters unsuitable to know and that was precisely the reason I wanted to know them.

Of course, it was a bitter disappointment.

I would like leave to go home tomorrow on a visit, please, it said. I am very unhappy and need to see my father. Poor little mite, I thought as I read the signature. Betty Alder.

A poor little mite indeed. I refolded the paper and let it fall for Miss Shanks to find when she returned.

Walking along the passages to the staffroom, though, I could not get the girl out of my mind. Part of it was worry about Donald, I supposed, in a funny sort of way, for there was something behind his sudden decision to trawl all the way home and all the way back again. I only hoped that he had not made the journey hoping for my ear and shoulder only to find himself stuck with Hugh and unable to get away again. Donald was never one to hurt our feelings and was always confident that we both – even Hugh – had them.

There was so much sorrow in that little letter. I could not leave the child to the sympathy of Miss Shanks, who had been cold even in referring to her and could not be expected to be warm when faced with her asking for dispensation. I put my head around the staffroom door, meaning to tell Miss Shanks that her room was her own again. She was not there and that decided me. Sabbatina Aldo needed comfort and needed it now. If Miss Shanks had gone to bed she would not see the note until the morning.

But how to find her?

‘Mrs Brown?’ I said. That lady was sitting planted four square in her tub chair by the sideboard. She looked up from her knitting and regarded me with some surprise. ‘Do you have a room list of the girls?’ She frowned. ‘At least that’s what they called it when I was at school. A chart of who’s where with all their names. It’s the names I want really, not the places, but I thought that would be where they were all written.’

‘Don’t you have class lists?’ said Mrs Brown. She, Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher were all looking at me very oddly now.

‘I haven’t come across any,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Miss Lipscott put them in an out of the way corner and I haven’t turned them up yet.’

‘You mean you haven’t been taking the register?’ said Miss Christopher.

I smiled what I hoped was an ingratiating smile, secretly thinking that I had done rather well getting to Monday evening before my first big gaffe came to light.

‘Oh, I’m sure the other girls would have mentioned it if one of them were missing,’ I said. ‘But that’s even more reason to get my hand on these room lists, Mrs Brown. I’ll make up a register for tomorrow.’

She shared another look with Miss Christopher and Miss Barclay and then jammed her knitting needles into her ball of wool and hauled herself to her feet. As I followed her to the housekeeper’s room I wondered again about Hugh’s jibe. Was there an easier way around this too? Should I have been able to find out where Sabbatina Aldo might be without these convolutions?

Convoluted or not, though, my method worked. Mrs Brown handed over a paper ledger of reddish brown, stuffed with health certificates, notes of doctors’ visits and a plan of the house with the girls’ names printed out in pencil against their dorms.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I shall take very great care of it and return it to you as soon as I can.’ Then I hurried off, already flipping through its pages, and had found ALDER clearly marked against a dorm on the west side of the house before I had turned the first corner.

It was a pleasant enough room. The afternoon sun had warmed it, and with the four bedside lamps lit and a large white radiator emanating more heat it almost managed – linoleum floor and metal bedsteads notwithstanding – not to seem too much like a hospital or (I imagined) a prison. The girls had covered their dresser tops with pictures of their families and pets and on three of the beds there were brightly patterned quilts and coverlets over the brown school blankets. The fourth was covered with a white bedspread of fine pulled stitching, edged with crocheted scallops in wool as light as spiders’ webs; and on it Sabbatina was sitting, the very picture of woe.

‘I came to see if you’re all right,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sabbatina. ‘I’m not.’ And then the tears began to pour out of her, as though pulsing from some internal pump of efficient design, as she hugged herself and rocked back and forth. I sat down beside her and stretched out one hand to rub her back, half-expecting a rebuff. Instead she turned, threw both her arms around my middle, buried her head in my breast and sobbed as though her heart would break, gulping and sniffing and simply howling, on and on.

I had no daughters and my only sister did not particularly like me, so it had been years since someone had engulfed me in a hug and bawled, and Sabbatina Aldo was much bigger than the boys had been the last time they had broken down over the death of a pony or a whipping from Hugh. This was very different and I felt rather panicked as I patted and shushed and smoothed back her masses of hair (this last was not exactly comfort, but more to get it out of my face and stop it tickling me).

‘I know I’ve got to go and live at home now,’ she said eventually, in a voice muffled by being buried against my shirt and made nasal by the inevitable accompaniment to all those tears. ‘But I don’t want to leave St Columba’s. And I don’t want to stay either. I don’t fit anywhere and there’s no one to help me.’ She was seized by another storm of weeping and by the time this one had passed her breath was coming in hiccups.

‘What about your father?’ I said, trying to set her back from me a little without seeming as if I were doing so. Her note had pleaded for permission to visit him. ‘Can’t you and he help one another?’

She did sit up a bit then, and she blinked and sniffed and went searching for a handkerchief to begin to mop herself up.

‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said. ‘Everything’s changed.’

‘Oh, Sabbatina,’ I said. ‘There are always two sides. At least two.’

‘I know I shall have to forgive him in the end but I just can’t imagine it now.’

Which I thought was a bit thick. Joe Aldo was quite the most loving, affectionate and proud husband and father I had ever encountered (certainly I had never seen his like in my own family) and if anyone were to be shunned and then grudgingly forgiven it should be the minx of a wife who had abandoned him and left this poor wretched child to cry herself hoarse with a stranger. Very probably the psychologists could explain the muddle, but it was beyond me.

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘I think the best thing for you to do is work hard at your lessons and visit on Saturday as usual. I mean, not as usual, obviously, but…’

‘It’s the Saturday after Parents’ Day,’ Sabbatina said, and she started to sniff again. ‘Parents’ Day! They’ll all be here taking the girls out for tea. I wish I could just run away and never come back.’

‘Now, now, don’t even talk about that,’ I said. ‘Gosh, the last thing anyone needs is you running away too. You know how awful it is for those left behind. Hm? Now, promise me?’

She rubbed the tears which had just started to form and fall, and nodded.

‘I promise.’

‘Good girl,’ I said. ‘Now you go and splash your face and clean your teeth and I’ll turn down your bed for you. An early night will do you a world of good.’

‘No!’ said Sabbatina, then she bit her lip. ‘Please don’t- I mean, please don’t take my cover off, Miss Gilver. I’d like to keep it on tonight.’ She had clutched a fold of it in her hand as she spoke but she smoothed it out again now. I smoothed my own hand over it too, studying the tiny stitches and the intricate knots and webs of the pattern, and decided to let her have her way, although it offended every nursery rule ever written not to take off a counterpane at bedtime.

We parted company outside the bathroom door and I descended the nearest staircase, meaning to take the ledger back to Mrs Brown. Finding myself, however, at one end of the corridor leading to the flower room, I decided that instead of risking another trip to fetch Fleur’s bags tomorrow I would go now while the house was quiet. I took a look both ways and then set off on quick light feet with the ledger under my arm and my ear cocked for the sounds of unwanted company.

I met no one on the way, however, and opened the door congratulating myself on the decision. Hugh was quite wrong: I did not make difficulties for myself at all. I closed the door softly, clicked on the electric light and turned around.

The bottom shelf was clear. The bags were gone.

I scanned the shelves and looked behind them, even shifting a few bulky items to make doubly, triply sure. There was no doubt of it, however. They had lain undisturbed since Saturday afternoon and I had had a fine chance to nab them. Stupidly, I had taken the bags which would tell me nothing (the bags of a woman already found) and left those which might yield some clue of the woman vanished. And who had taken them? I had been speaking on the telephone for quite a while, but the Misses Barclay and Christopher had had a very settled look in that staffroom of theirs. Mrs Brown, too: she had got up out of her armchair like the sword from the stone. Ivy Shanks! Of course. She had said she was going to the staffroom, but she was not there. And she had seen me with what she thought was my luggage searching for a place to store it. Perhaps she had only then thought to wonder what had become of Miss Lipscott’s things or the mademoiselle’s.

Then another thought struck me. Had she really believed those bags were mine? Taking my own with me this time, I sped upstairs to my room and shot inside almost expecting that luggage to be gone too. There it was, though, shoved just inside the door where I had left it. I opened my large case – glad now that I could not lift the thing – stowed Jeanne’s more modest-sized one inside it and closed it tight, strapping it and locking it and putting the key in my pocket. I locked her overnight bag in my wardrobe. I smoothed my hair, tried in front of the glass to bring my face back to the look of serenity bordering on weariness that one would get from making up register lists, and headed back to the staffroom with Mrs Brown’s ledger.

She was re-established in her tub chair and her knitting had grown another inch or so. Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher were as they had been too, at either end of their empire sofa, and Miss Shanks had reappeared. She was looking rather ruffled. From exertion, I wondered? From barrelling around the passageways with a heavy bag in each hand? She did not have the build for it. Actually, though, the dominant look about all of them was one of arrested movement; as though they had been stopped short in the midst of some animated exchange.

‘Your ledger, Mrs Brown,’ I said, setting it down again on the table at her elbow. ‘I’ve got my class lists all drawn up now. Thank you.’

‘Have you then?’ said Mrs Brown. ‘Have you indeed?’ She gave quite the most horrible imaginable look out of the corner of her eye towards the other three, sliding her gaze right to the edge of her eye sockets so that only the white showed and not moving her head even an inch.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound offhand. I took a breath to say more.

‘That’s clever of you,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘Seeing as how the forms aren’t listed here.’

I recovered fairly quickly.

‘Well, there are only a hundred, aren’t there? I just made one big alphabetical list and I’ll do the rest with coloured pencil. A code, you know. Yes, a code.’

Mrs Brown raised her eyebrows very slowly until her forehead was a rack of wrinkles, then just as slowly she turned her head and gave a hard stare towards Miss Shanks. Miss Shanks heaved an enormous sigh made up of grievance and self-pity and then plastered a more than usually sickly-sweet smile on her face.

‘I wonder if you would come and have a private word with me, Mrs Gilver,’ she said.

‘Mrs Gilver again, am I?’ I responded, startled.

‘In my office, nice and private,’ said Miss Shanks.

‘Oh Ivy, you’re no fun,’ said Miss Barclay and she gave me a greedy look with an unpleasant reptilian glitter about it.

‘What’s going on?’ I said. I had had a long and exhausting day full of other people’s emotions and perhaps it had worn me out. Certainly I was feeling most peculiar standing here. The way they were all looking at me made me want to feel behind myself for the door handle to be sure that if I had to I could easily get away.

‘What’s going on, she asks!’ said Miss Shanks, with a good measure of glee. ‘Well, you’ve been disappearing, haven’t you? Wandering the village when you should be at prayers, tramping about the countryside instead of supervising prep, you’ve made very free with my telephone and you’ve done a wee bitty too much skulking around the house too.’

‘Not to mention not taking the register,’ put in Miss Christopher.

‘And your discipline in the refectory is abysmal,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Giggling fits from start to finish and you just sit there and let them.’

‘And to cap it all,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘you go drinking in pubs. Don’t think you kept that one quiet.’

‘Rather difficult to keep anything quiet when there’s a member of the Brown family to hand,’ I said coolly. My face did not feel cool, for when they set out my last few days like the sweets stall at a bazaar they made pretty rich pickings.

‘I’ve done a wee tate of checking up on you,’ said Miss Shanks. My heart was hammering now. ‘And do you know what I found?’ I shook my head, dreading the answer.

‘I can’t find the Gilver and Osborne Agency listed anywhere. I rang the number on your wee card and all I got was some hoity-toity fellow-me-lad who wouldn’t give his name and had never heard of it.’

Pallister, I thought, not knowing whether to bless him or curse him. His wilful determination not to countenance the existence of my career had no doubt cost me a case or two in the past (and I thanked the gods that most requests came by written letter) but at least he had not regaled Miss Shanks with the news that Gilver and Osborne were detectives.

‘So we’ve been having a wee confab to ourselves,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘And we reckon you’re no more an English mistress than I’m a kangaroo.’ I kept my gaze level and waited. ‘We reckon you were just chancing your arm slipping in here when you knew your pal was slipping out, looking for a roof over your head and three square meals a day.’ Still, I made my face remain impassive. Was it possible that they had, in Teddy’s phrase, rumbled me as a counterfeit schoolmistress and yet completely missed the truth?

‘So we’re all agreed?’ Miss Barclay said, looking round.

‘I’ve been saying it since Friday,’ said Mrs Brown.

‘We’re all agreed,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We’d like you to leave, Mrs Gilver. Anderson will take your things down to the Crown directly.’

‘What about the girls?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to give them their English lessons?’

‘I’m sure Miss Glennie will oblige,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘And it’s really none of your concern anyway.’

‘So I’m being sacked,’ I said, ‘for using a telephone I was invited to use and for going on walks no one told me not to go on and for spending time in a village inn that you knew I was staying at when you employed me, because you visited me there.’

‘You’re being sacked,’ said Miss Barclay coldly, ‘for perpetrating a fraud.’

‘Och, come on away!’ trilled Miss Shanks. ‘No need to get so het up.’

‘I’ll make my farewell then, ladies,’ I said. ‘I wish you well and give my regards to Miss Lovage and Miss Glennie.’

I bowed my head briefly and left them. Part of me was glad to be released, I thought on my way upstairs again, for now I could investigate the case instead of reading stories with schoolgirls and letting Alec have all the fun. Another part of me, however, could not bear the thought of leaving this strangest of places before I had discovered what was going on here. A third part of me, despite the fact that it was happening with depressing regularity these days, still felt that the touch of a boot to the seat of my skirts made rather a dent in my dignity.

But there was no time to nurse it. Before I left St Columba’s for ever there was something I had to do.