Bothersome Number of Corpses

9

‘Miss Glennie?’ I said, opening the door in response to the timid invitation to enter.

‘Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘Again.’ She was hunched over her desk with a great number of sheets of paper spread around, but looked up as I entered.

‘I’ve come to warn you,’ I said, closing the door behind me. ‘I know you’ve only just arrived but if there was another opening you turned down in preference to this one, I’d urge you very strongly to see if it’s still there.’

‘There wasn’t,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Lambourne only sent me this one and I was lucky to have that. And then Miss Shanks has been very kind to me… most accommodating. Bent over backwards, actually.’

‘No doubt,’ I said, thinking of the way Ivy Shanks had given over her study to me and allowed Alec to visit me in my room until her swift volte-face and my even swifter sacking. ‘And do you know she’s expecting you to teach English as well?’ I saw from her quick frown that this was news. ‘I’ve been given the boot, you see. And I want to help it not happen to you.’

‘I-’ stammered Miss Glennie. ‘I’ll very happily take on English if there’s time. I mean, the other mistresses help out in areas not their own, don’t they?’

‘Well, then, at the very least, if there’s any way that you could…’ I fell silent. This next bit was rather difficult to work one’s way round to. ‘If you had said anything, out of nerves perhaps, over-egging or maybe even slightly exaggerating your curriculum vitae, I think it would be a good idea to see if you could perhaps tone it down a bit. Rescind, if possible. Recant. Miss Shanks can be a bit capricious when it comes to… she might seem to have countenanced something that she later will pounce on. You might not even know why.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Miss Glennie. She looked baffled; no sign that she had caught even a wisp of my meaning.

‘Well, if you didn’t want her to know that you’d been without a position for a while and you said something… unlikely… that you regretted.’

‘My last position?’ said Miss Glennie, cottoning on at last. ‘She’s been nothing but sweet about that. And I didn’t tell her. Lambourne told her.’

‘You told them, presumably,’ I said, thinking she was rather splitting hairs.

‘I think they knew anyway,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘They hinted as much when they rang me. I was… very surprised.’

Not as surprised as me, I thought, staring at her. Could it be true after all that this awkward woman really had been a member of the royal household? How did she come from that to Miss Shanks’s school? Or even to a scholastic agency? Would she not be desired by every family in the land to teach their little ones the French she had taught to the princes and the princess there?

‘Naturally, I hadn’t said a word,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘But one of the Lambourne ladies is Aberdonian and maybe there was a domestic connection.’

‘Very possibly,’ I said, thinking of the Browns and how they ran the Crown, the Post office and St Columba’s amongst them. ‘And very commendable of you, Miss Glennie, I must say, not to trade on your illustrious acquaintance. It must make you uncomfortable that Miss Shanks is so much less circumspect, eh?’

‘I’m in no position to complain,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Thankful to have a job and to be accepted by these good people.’

Almost as though, I thought to myself, it was something of which to be ashamed. A very odd position to take, unless one had fallen in with Bolshies, which Miss Shanks and her mistresses were not.

‘Well, I’ve said my piece,’ I concluded, ‘and I wish you all the very best, in spite of it. I hope you will be happy here.’ Miss Glennie gave a pained smile, although whether to indicate that she doubted it or simply that she had had enough of this odd woman bothering her was hard to say.

‘You seem to have settled in anyway,’ I said, waving a hand around at the watercolours hanging on walls which had been bare the day before and the crowd of photographs on the chimneypiece. I am ashamed to say, I even sidled towards these to see if among them were any of the exalted household; for governesses, like nannies, were much given to mementoes of their charges. To my disappointment, if not my surprise (for I still did not quite believe the Balmoral angle), the photographs in their ornate frames were two ancient ones of a couple dressed in high Edwardian style, and a enormous number of just one child from infanthood to the army.

‘My parents and my brother,’ said Miss Glennie.

I knew better than to ask about the brother, for when the photographs stop with a young man in uniform one knows exactly what it means.

‘And are your parents… gone to their rest?’ I said. It was Grant’s phrase and I had not employed it before.

‘No,’ said Miss Glennie, her face tightening.

‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘Awfully sorry.’ And since there is nothing much to say after one has suggested that a person’s entire family is dead and been corrected, I bade her goodnight and withdrew. Well, what did she expect? I asked myself crossly as I returned to my own room. She should have a snap of them all white of hair and gnarled of knuckle at their cottage gate if she wanted people to know they were still living.

‘Ah, there ye are,’ said a gruff voice as I turned the last corner. The sound of it was startling in this place where femininity reigned. It was Anderson the handyman.

‘Here to see me off the premises?’ I said.

‘Just to give ye a lift wi’ yer bags, miss,’ he said, and his eyes, it is true, were kindly enough. He might be Miss Shanks’s servant but he was not, I thought, her henchman.

‘Lots of coming and going, eh?’ I said. Anderson raised his eyes to heaven and whistled. Meanwhile I opened my suitcase, standing with my back to him and hoping to cover my movements. I took out Jeanne Beauclerc’s case and immediately sat my hat on top of it. I opened my wardrobe, extracted the small bag and dropped my mackintosh over it. Thus I tried to hide the initials, which had winked at me in the lamplight.

‘And now I just need to throw some things in here,’ I said, nodding at my own case.

‘I’ll go down and get your trunk,’ he said. ‘I thought ye were packed and ready.’

‘Oh, I don’t have a trunk,’ I said, flinging open drawers and tossing underclothes into the open suitcase. Anderson looked everywhere except at the flying stockings and vests. I scraped the heap of brushes, papers, cigarettes and powder tins in on top and shut the lid, stuffing in the escaping corners of garments until the latch caught and I could lock it.

He lifted it without effort and made a move towards the larger of Jeanne Beauclerc’s cases too.

‘I’ll take those, Anderson,’ I said, working my hands in under the hat and coat and grasping the handles.

‘Away,’ said Anderson. ‘I’ll manage them fine. One under ma oxter and the other in ma hand.’

‘No, no, really, I insist,’ I said.

‘I’m mebbes nearly seventy but I’m no’ that clapped out just yet,’ he said, setting his jaw at a mulish angle.

‘Oh God,’ I said – which shocked him more than my proposal to carry my own bags – and lifted the hat and coat. He was looking me right in the eye as he tucked the overnight case under one arm, but he glanced down as he grasped the other handle and his eyes widened. J.A.deV.B. glinted unmistakably there. I considered for just a second trying to convince him that these were the initials of my maiden name, but the notion passed without making its way as far as my lips.

‘You must be wondering about that, Anderson,’ I said. But he surprised me.

‘I keep my head down and my trap shut,’ he said. ‘This job comes wi’ a house and there’s a fine big stretch o’ garden.’

Now my eyes flashed. What did he keep his head down to avoid seeing? What did he keep his trap shut about? Before I could ask him, we were disturbed by the sound of someone approaching. Not Miss Shanks for once, I thought, even before the figure appeared at the bend in the passageway. It was Miss Barclay, holding herself very rigid and with a thin smile of untold meanness on her mouth. She held out a brown envelope to me.

‘One day’s pay, Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘So there’ll be no need for you to come back for anything once you’ve gone.’ She glanced at Anderson and I was surprised and delighted to see that he had turned the case, so that its initials were hidden against his corduroyed leg.

‘Miss,’ he said, giving a nod.

Miss Barclay gave exactly the same nod back to him and, with her mouth even tighter and yet even more amused by it all, she left us.

I followed Anderson in silence to the side door, where he loaded my bags onto a small handcart, lit a lantern which swung from a pole at its prow and started pushing it up the drive.

‘It’s a jolly long way,’ I said, trotting after him.

‘Safer than the cliff steps, though but,’ said Anderson.

‘And it’ll give us a nice chance for a chat,’ I said, hopefully.

‘We’ve got space for ten chickens and we can fatten a pig,’ said Anderson, returning to his previous topic. ‘And there’s a good apple tree and a fine patch o’ rhubarb and brambles all over the bank.’

‘And I would do nothing to put any of that in danger of being snatched away,’ I said. ‘If you have anything to tell me I shall think of some way to make it seem I found out from an entirely different quarter, you have my word.’

‘Oh, it’s no’ that,’ said Anderson. We had emerged from the drive now and were making our way along the top road towards the row of villas. ‘Just if St C.’s gets shut down what’s to become of Maidie and me? Our laddie has six o’ a family in a two-room house and our lass is in service. I dinnae fancy the Parish – would you? – so I keep my head down.’

‘And your trap shut, yes,’ I said. So whatever it was would close St Columba’s down, would it, if it ever came to light?

‘Anyway, nae harm done,’ said Anderson.

‘I’m not sure Mademoiselle Beauclerc would agree with you,’ I said, crisply. ‘Or Miss Lipscott.’

‘Eh?’ said Anderson. ‘They’re off an’ out o’ it. They’re all right now.’ I made the mistake of looking as interested as I felt in this cryptic remark and by the light of his lantern he saw me. He shut his mouth as though he meant never to open it again in his life and put his head down like a bull, pointing the way with his lowered brow. I got not another syllable until he lifted his cap at the door of the Crown and said farewell.

The landlady of the Crown was in her dressing gown and curling papers with vanishing cream in a thick layer all over her face, but she had me sign the guestbook without making too much of a murmur – after I named a lordly new rate for the same room in which I had spent that first night – and she unbent so far as first to shout for her husband to carry my cases and then to ask me if I had had my tea or would I like a drop of soup brought up to me.

‘The parlour fire’s banked for the night, madam,’ she said, ‘so you’ll be cosier in your bedroom with the gas on.’

It seemed a long time since dinner with those silly little girls but I rejected the offer. I know that the leftover soup from a Scotswoman’s kitchen is not for the fainthearted, given its starting point of rib-sticking heft and the nature of the inevitable barley which works away long after the actual cooking is done, so that sometimes second- or (I have heard tell of it) third-day soup can be just as easily eaten with a fork as with a spoon.

A door across the landing cracked open as the landlord – hastily bundled into his trousers over his nightshirt – set my bags down inside the door of my room and in the space I saw the gleam of more vanishing cream and the wink of the landing light glancing off spectacle lenses. The landlord stumped off to the back stairs.

‘Can I help you?’ I said with cold grandeur, at which the convalescent widow opened her door and attempted to stare me down.

‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He left this morning.’

‘I do not have the pleasure of understanding you,’ I replied.

‘Oh, very dignified,’ she said, ‘with your chin in the air and your head high!’ Her lip had curled. ‘I wouldn’t live that grubby, scrabbling life of yours for a king’s ransom.’

There could be no doubt of her meaning and I should have been able to sneer back, shrug and shut my door but I was possessed of some devil all of a sudden. I could not help thinking of all the girls who would hang their heads in the face of it. I saw Jeanne Beauclerc’s drooping head in my mind’s eye and remembered her saying her family did not own her. I saw Fleur’s pinched, pale face and her fathomless reserve. I saw the scared eyes of Miss Thomasina Glennie as she huddled over her papers, shrinking away from me. I could picture too Miss Blair’s look of hurt and bewilderment, as Alec had described it, and I wondered what we would see in the faces of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell if we should ever find them. Something – some idea, vague and shapeless – shifted deep inside me like a shipwreck dragging across the ocean floor when a current catches it broadside.

I blinked and the widow came into focus again.

‘Gossip is a nasty habit, my dear madam,’ I said, ‘but slander is a crime. Or is it libel when it’s written? I can never remember. And lying is a sin.’

‘I don’t know what you mean!’ she said, thoroughly ruffled.

‘And the poison from a pen travels up the arm more readily than it does onto the paper,’ I went on.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Imagine if you died tonight. And met your Maker.’

‘You’re not right in your head!’ she said. ‘I shall go to the police tomorrow and tell them you’ve threatened me.’

‘You do that,’ I said to her, smiling, ‘and see what they say.’

I allowed her to turn, with a swish of her shiny dressing gown, and slam her door. It would have been very satisfying to beat her to it and leave her standing there, but I wondered if the idea would come back and take form if I kept still and let it return to me. I was still waiting motionless, when the electric landing light, set on a timer I supposed against the profligacy of the guests, clicked off again and left me in blackness.

Inside my room, I set Jeanne’s cases by the door for the morning and began the dreary task of unpacking the jumble of belongings I had swept into my own. A box of powder, improperly clasped, had burst open and liberally doused the top layer of items. I banged my hairbrush and blew the worst of it off my sleeping cap, then I lifted an untidy heap of papers and shook them like maracas. One green sheet drifted free and eddied to the floor. Oh Lord, I thought, as I dumped the rest of them down and bent to retrieve it. It was an examination paper. In all my muddle I had not returned it to Miss Shanks and in all hers she had forgotten to ask for it from me. But should I burn it or send it back to her in the morning? I sat down on the low fire stool and started leafing through the rest of the pile – newspapers, scribbled notes on the case, scribbled notes on my abandoned lessons – for the other one. Halfway through the heap, I caught a glimpse of the pink paper I remembered taking from Miss Shanks’s hands. And there on top of it was something else. Something I could not understand coming to be there.

It was a letter, a pale mauve envelope, and the address, written in blue ink with a thick pen, was Miss I. Shanks (Headm.), St Columba’s School, Portpatrick. I picked it up and stared at it, then I ran over the scene in Miss Shanks’s office in my mind: she opened the safe and stirred the disorder of papers inside it. Aha! Yes, she had stopped a small landslide with her knee and shoved the things back. She had handed me two sheets, and this envelope must have been caught between them.

It had not occurred to me then but it struck me as very odd now. No one kept letters in a safe, did they? One kept examination papers (if one ran a school), deeds, bonds, cash, jewels, one’s chequebook if one were the cautious sort. But not letters, unless it were that one happened to have an autograph letter from some great man – the Duke of Marlborough on the eve of battle, say. And yet Ivy Shanks had had a heap of them, and great men did not write on the eve of battle using blue ink and mauve paper.

I turned the envelope over and lifted the flap with not even a moment’s hesitation. The sender was a Mr Thos. Simmons. His name and address (The Rowans, Moffat) were embossed on the paper along with a reproduced etching of his house in a little oval lozenge, two dark patches on either side representing the eponymous rowans, one supposed.

Dear Miss Shanks, the letter began. Thank you most kindly for yours of the seventeenth. My lady wife and I will most certainly look forward to seeing you on ‘Parents’ Day’ at St Columba’s and are already anticipating with eagerness getting down to the ‘nitty-gritty’. Ship ahoy! Or as it might be – Tally-ho! We are delighted to hear that Tilly is ‘doing so well’. Yours most faithfully, Mr & Mrs Thos. Simmons.

Of course, I thought. The name of Simmons had rung a bell. ‘Tilly’ who was ‘doing so well’ (why the quotation marks there? Who could say?) was Clothilde Simmons, to whom Miss Shanks had alerted me during my one and only day as English mistress. That one part of the letter made sense to me: the rest of it was a mystery. Tally-ho? Ship ahoy? Nitty-gritty? And had Miss Shanks really written a letter to every pair of parents inviting them to the Parents’ Day, which must come around with foreseeable regularity every year? If she had found the time for such a pointless gesture, why on earth was she keeping their replies in the safe?

Thoughtfully, I folded the letter and returned it to the envelope, then I tucked it and the examination papers back into the gloves pocket of my bag. The letter was a crashing let-down when it came to the puzzle of Ivy Shanks and the greater (if more nebulous) puzzle of St Columba’s in general, but it was good to have some reason to go back there should the need arise, if only because that little brown envelope of money from Miss Barclay showed me how very much they hoped I would not do so.

I finished my rough unpacking, paying less and less attention to the removal of powder as the task went on, and then crawled, exhausted, into my little bed in a dusty but sweet-smelling nightgown and was dead to the world before the midnight high tide came crashing and booming into the harbour.

I was up and off long before the landlady had started frying bacon the next morning, and all was quiet behind the convalescent widow’s bedroom door. The station, in contrast, was greatly a-bustle, fish crates stacked under sacking waiting for the goods train to take them to town and enough housewives in their good coats and farmers in their good trousers to imply that today was a market day somewhere and a train bound for it was due along soon. Checking with the ticket-master, I decided to wait instead of dropping off Miss Beauclerc’s bags and was rewarded less than a quarter of an hour later when a figure in a bulky checked overcoat of an unlikely blue and with a headscarf pulled far forward and tied on the chin so that only a sliver of face was showing, and that in shadow, stopped in front of me and cleared her throat. The slim legs and narrow, hand-stitched shoes did not go with the garish coat and dowdy headgear and when I looked up it was into the face, pale and stark, of Jeanne Beauclerc.

‘Thank you, Miss Gilver,’ she said, sitting down on the bench beside me. ‘Your good husband rang me last evening and he has told me I will be met at your little station. He has told me that I am to be a guest in your house, not a servant after all.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Glad to help. We’ll find Fleur, and as soon as we do I shall ring home and let you know.’ She nodded and bit her lip. ‘I don’t suppose, now you’re on your way, that you’ll tell me any more of what’s going on?’ She shook her head. ‘I thought as much, but I had to try. Well, can you tell me this? My husband asked me and I assured him, so I’d like you to assure me. You’re not mixed up with any rascals who’re looking for you, are you? Or in trouble with the police?’

‘There will be no rascals,’ said Miss Beauclerc and for the first time I thought I could hear a smile in her voice. ‘Your husband is in no danger.’

‘And no police? I know you must be in some kind of trouble to be planning, as you were, to run away.’

‘No police,’ said Miss Beauclerc. Then she ruined the reassurance completely. ‘I was acquitted.’

‘Of what?’ I said, sitting up and peering round the corner of her headscarf to look into her eyes. ‘My son is there too, you see. Young and innoc- Well, impressionable anyway.’

‘Of everything,’ she said calmly. ‘If your son is there perhaps I can make myself useful instructing him. I am a French mistress more than I am an embroiderer, you see.’

I quailed to think what a Frenchwoman of twenty-five whose family had disowned her, acquitted or no, could teach Donald, but before I could say anything everyone turned their heads in unison as the train whistle sounded just out of sight.

‘I’ll be in touch very soon,’ I said. ‘You’ll probably only need to be there a day or two.’ I was comforting myself now. ‘But, I say, I tell you what you could do for me. My dog – Bunty – dear old thing. You could cuddle her and spoil her. Hugh would never be cruel but he neglects her most fearfully when I’m away. I’ve come back before now to find her billeted in the stables, the poor darling. If you like dogs, that is. I’d be very grateful.’

‘I adore little doggies,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘What kind is she?’

‘A Dalmatian,’ I said. ‘Not so little. Do you know-’

‘But of course. With the polka-dots like a pretty dress. Such beautiful creatures. I shall give her all your hugs and kisses and tell her of your love.’

With that the train was upon us, snorting and steaming like a beast from mythology in that terrific way that trains always seem to do when they arrive in very quiet country stations (in comparison with great metropolitan stations where amongst the other noise and bustle the trains seem quite tame creatures). Jeanne Beauclerc stood, kissed me once on each cheek, and stepped inside the first-class carriage.

Acquitted of everything, was all I could think of as I made my way back to the Crown. Should I ring Hugh and tell him? I am sorry to say that the thought of Bunty being showered with kisses won the day and I decided that Hugh and even Donald were big boys now and could cope with whatever a Mademoiselle Beauclerc might bring. So I turned my mind to the case again, the great sprawling tentacled monster of a case, still growing and still eluding my grasp with every flex of its muscular form.

‘Sacked?’ said Alec, cackling down the line. ‘Dear goodness, Dan. So where are you?’

‘Back at the Crown,’ I said. ‘Much to the disgust of the widow.’

‘Poor you,’ Alec said. ‘The Horseshoe at Egton is a delightful billet. I reckon I could put up here for a good three weeks until I’d eaten my way through their supper menu and the breakfast I’ve just polished off – words fail me.’

‘Good,’ I said, but he had been speaking metaphorically.

‘I had this stuff – a kind of sausage, I suppose – that goes by the name of black pudding. Have you ever had black pudding, Dandy? It’s a little like boudin noir, only-’

‘It’s a great deal like boudin noir, you goose,’ I said. ‘It is boudin noir!’

‘Really?’ Alec said. ‘I failed to recognise it in the midst of the general fry-up, I suppose.’

‘There really isn’t time for-’ I said.

‘Speaking of fry-ups,’ said Alec, ‘what of Joe?’

‘I don’t think you fully appreciate just how busy I’ve been at this end,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had time to hold Joe’s hand as well as everything else. I’ve made our apologies and he’s on his own. Literally. Poor Sabbatina is so angry with him, she can’t look him in the eye.’

‘Angry with him?’ said Alec.

‘I know, it’s terribly unfair,’ I said. ‘But it’s very hard to be angry with someone who’s gone. And one can’t help but wonder…’

‘What?’

‘Oh, if all the lovey-dovey stuff is genuine or if it was for our benefit, after the fact,’ I said. ‘I mean, he charmed me and he charmed you. His own daughter is most likely of all three to have a clear view of the man. And his wife did leave, after all. Anyway, never mind that. Now I’m released from servitude again we can apportion the tasks a bit more equally.’

‘As long as I don’t get stuck with the donkey work now that you’re available,’ said Alec.

‘You choose first then,’ I replied. ‘I’m just happy not to be reading Milton. Except, clearly, it makes sense for me to talk to the Portpatrick police.’ I heard him drawing breath to ask what about, so I told him. ‘The news that Fleur’s bags were left behind makes me much more worried that she didn’t just take off. And knowing that she had a plan and abandoned it only adds to the concern. They need to put a lot more effort into finding her, if you ask me.’

‘Agreed,’ Alec said. ‘And agreed also that you should do that since you’re there. As far as I can see, the other tasks are finding out about the car crash that killed Charles – thanks for the telegram, by the way; it raised my stock no end with the serving wenches. Got me a sandwich at bedtime. The other thing we need to do is find out what happened to the Misses Taylor and Bell.’

‘And I only hope that one thing or another jogs the whole mess back into gear somehow,’ I said. ‘I’m convinced there’s a pattern there somewhere if I could catch hold of the ends…’

‘My dear, your metaphors,’ said Alec. ‘But I know what you mean. It’s a veritable hydra this one, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘Even if we excise your case from the tangle – ignore Joe, ignore Sabbatina, ignore what Cissie saw – there’s still Fleur and Jeanne and Miss Blair and Miss Taylor and Miss Bell.’

‘And No. 5 and Elf and Charles and another two murder victims somewhere,’ said Alec.

‘And Miss Shanks and Barclay and Christopher and Lovage,’ I said.

‘And the new one,’ said Alec.

‘Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘But she doesn’t go with them. She’s another like Fleur and the mademoiselle.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Alec. I thought very carefully before I answered him.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, at last. ‘Just a hunch. One of those wispy…’

‘Oh, one of them,’ Alec said, teasingly. ‘Well, I suppose they’ve led you to a solution more than once before now.’

‘They’ve led me up the garden path a lot more often, though,’ I said. ‘And to complete our list there’s “The School”. I almost wish I had managed to stick it. At least until Parents’ Day.’

‘What’s that?’ said Alec. ‘Sort of a Speech Day thing?’

‘Yes, and I found the most peculiar letter from a parent accepting the invitation to it.’

‘Oh?’ said Alec. ‘Peculiar how?’

‘Well, Miss Shanks had it under lock and key for one thing. And it said how pleased the father was with his daughter’s form place and how much he was looking forward to coming for a visit. And it said “Tally-ho” for no good reason I can see.’

‘Well, call for the police,’ said Alec. ‘Tally-ho, eh?’

‘You’ll be sorry you mocked me when the dread deeds come to light,’ I told him. ‘So, Taylor and Bell for you? Or Charles and the car crash?’

‘Oh, Taylor and Bell, I think,’ said Alec. ‘The girl on the desk at the Lambourne Agency is my old friend, remember. I’ve got a head start with her. And anyway, I’d rather telephone than drag myself to a library. It’s fish pie for lunch at the Horseshoe.’

‘Don’t forget the Somerville College possibility if the agency can’t help you,’ I said. ‘Until later then.’ I rang off and remained seated in the little alcove, thinking it all over and planning the course of my day until I grew aware that someone was watching me. Suspecting the widow, I turned with a cold look on my face, but it was only the maid.

‘Are you finished with the telephone, madam?’ she said. ‘Only I’ve to sweep the hall.’

‘It’s Miss Brown, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Mary, madam,’ she said. ‘I’m only a parlour maid.’

‘But it’s Mary Brown,’ I persisted.

‘Yes, m’m,’ she said.

‘Well, Mary, I don’t know how much of my conversation you overheard while you were standing there,’ I said, ‘but make no mistake, I shall take a very dim view if any of it gets up the hill to your aunt at the school.’

‘Oh no, m’m,’ she said, colouring deeply and clasping her hands in front of her.

‘I shan’t scruple to inform your employers and I shan’t be content until I know you’re not in a position to carry tales again.’

‘No, no really, m’m,’ she said. ‘It’s not me. I mean, yes, Mrs Brown is my auntie, but it’s my sister, you mean. Kitchen maid. Her and Auntie Belle are as thick as thieves. I’m not- I mean, it’s Elsie you mean and I don’t tell her nothin’.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, and with one last bob the poor girl scuttled off into the back regions, presumably to fetch her brushes. I stood and stretched and made for the foot of the stairs, but was arrested by the sight of the widow, with her companion beside her, halfway up the first flight, looking down on me. She was holding the younger woman back with one arm thrown out.

‘Threatening the little maid now, is it?’ she said. ‘You need a doctor, not a policeman.’

‘I see that your companion has more breeding than you, madam,’ I said, nodding at how the widow’s arm was blocking the way. ‘She clearly understands that one should make one’s presence known when one intrudes upon a private conversation, not lurk at the turn in the stairs, eavesdropping.’

‘And would you say eavesdropping,’ said the widow, flushing, ‘is a bad habit, a crime or a sin, Mrs Gilver?’ She half-turned to the other who was squirming with embarrassment. ‘I told you, Enid. She’s without any shame.’

‘Eavesdropping,’ I said, ‘is a window on a flawed moral character but too tawdry to dwell upon. Blackmail, now… Blackmail is much more serious.’

‘Blackmail!’ said the widow.

‘Strictly, I suppose, just the first careful step towards it.’

‘Are you threatening me?’ said the widow, while her companion shifted from foot to foot and whimpered ineffectually at her elbow.

‘Only with exposure,’ I said. ‘Do you deny it?’

‘Blackmail now!’ said the widow. ‘Slander and libel and lying and blackmail. You’re not safe to be out amongst decent people! Come on, Enid. Let’s go. I need some fresh wholesome air.’

At the police station, to my disappointment, it was Sergeant Turner who came to see who had crossed the threshold and caused the bell to ring.

‘Mrs Gilver,’ he said, in the tone one would use to say ‘burst water mains’ or ‘flat tyre’.

‘Sergeant Turner!’ I said, trying to sound as one would saying ‘rising stock prices’ or ‘sunshine forecast’. ‘I was wondering if there was any news in the hunt for Miss Lipscott. I have some evidence to add to what we know of her disappearance.’

‘There you go again, madam,’ he said. ‘We-ing. We, the police, might not choose to share anything we know with you, the general public.’

‘Well, Sergeant,’ I said, after a swift review of whether there was any reason not to tell him, now that I had given up trying to pass myself off as a mistress at St Columba’s, ‘we – Mr Osborne and I – are not the general public, exactly. We’re private detectives. And we’ve worked with policemen before.’

‘Private detectives?’ said Sergeant Turner and, if I had to supply another phrase to suit the tone this time, ‘amoebic dysentery’ would be near the head of the queue.

‘Two things, Sergeant,’ I said, sailing on. ‘Miss Lipscott did not take her bags with her when she left. They were packed and yet she didn’t pick them up. If she left of her own accord and under her own steam it’s safer to say that she fled than simply moved on.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sergeant Turner and did not utter another syllable.

‘Also,’ I said, ‘I can tell you now with complete certainty that the body at the cable station – or wherever she is now – is not Jeanne Beauclerc.’

He dearly wanted to issue another bland thank you such as the police give to the general public who offer information, but he also wanted to disparage my contribution and after a struggle that urge won.

‘We knew that,’ he said. ‘Two mistresses from the school said it wasn’t her.’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘a faceless handless corpse… whereas I can confirm it for sure.’

‘How?’ said Sergeant Turner, after another brief struggle.

‘Oh good, let’s share our information after all,’ I said. ‘Good show.’

What, I wondered, was wrong with me this morning? I had gone after the poisonous widow like a Jack Russell terrier and now here I was antagonising the police sergeant too.

‘It’s not a question of sharing, Mrs Gilver,’ said the sergeant. ‘It’s a question of withholding – unless you answer my question. And withholding desired information from the police is a very serious matter.’

‘And is it desired, Sergeant?’ I said. I could not seem to help myself. ‘I thought you knew already that the body wasn’t Miss Beauclerc. What information do I have, to withhold or not?’

He glared at me for a moment and then looked over his shoulder and barked for the constable. Reid popped his head out of a door.

‘Deal with this, laddie,’ said Turner. ‘I’ve got more to be doing than wasting time with a lot of…’ He waved a hand and withdrew into the back premises well away from my nonsense. I turned down the corners of my mouth and flashed my eyes at Reid but he regarded me with a very stony expression.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘What’s what?’ said Reid.

‘Something’s wrong,’ I said.

‘Nowt wrong wi’ me,’ said Reid, but like his sergeant he lost the struggle with his better self. ‘What did you say to-’ He looked over his shoulder and dropped his voice. ‘What did you say to Cissie on Sunday?’

‘Many things,’ I replied. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s sent me a wee note this mornin’ wi’ Tam Ramsay the baker, sayin’ she won’t see me tonight.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s Tuesday, isn’t it? Your night for walking and – em – sitting. Well, possibly Cissie doesn’t feel the same about the Dunskey Castle cliffs since she had to think about someone plunging off them.’

‘Aye but it’s no’ just that she doesn’t want to go a walk,’ said Reid. ‘We sometimes go to the Empire in Stranraer. She disnae want to see me at all. What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’ I thought hard about our conversation. ‘I swear to you, William. Absolutely nothing. I’m sure all that’s wrong is that she’s unnerved by the talk of bodies and strangers and people watching. She’ll come round again. But listen, I’ve come to ask how the search is going for Miss Lipscott and also to tell you something.’

Quickly, I rehashed the tale of Fleur being packed and ready to go and yet leaving her bags behind her. He stared at me for a moment and I thought he might say another quelling thank you just as the sergeant had done, but he was made of finer stuff and had a sharper wit any day.

‘Why were her bags packed?’ he asked.

‘Because she had been planning to go already,’ I said. ‘Quite elaborately planning. She and Miss Beauclerc were going to go together. Only Beauclerc fled too. A few days before the plan was ready to be executed.’

‘And how did you find all this out?’

‘I found her,’ I told him.

‘You just asked me how the search was going-’

‘I found Miss Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘She was hiding at P- Well, in a local guesthouse, waiting for Miss Lipscott to send word to her.’

‘Paterson’s farm!’ said Reid. ‘I chapped their door on Saturday asking all about did they see the corpse go in and did they ken where Miss Lipscott was.’

‘They didn’t, to be fair,’ I said.

‘Splittin’ hairs, that! Right, well, I’d better get round there and talk to her. There’s somethin’ gey queer about all this runnin’ away.’

‘Ah, well, as to that,’ I said. ‘She’s not there now. She was only waiting for Fleur and when I told her Fleur was gone, there was no reason for her to hang around any more.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Reid very sternly, quite obviously blaming me for her departure. (If he knew that I had fetched her bags, he would have a fit. If he knew where she was going, he would have a heart attack.)

‘But to be fair,’ I said, ‘she knew nothing of No. 5 or of Fleur’s change of plan or where Fleur might have gone.’

‘She must ken where they were both headed to begin wi’,’ he said.

‘Miss Lipscott’s family home,’ I said. ‘But unless her family is lying, Fleur’s not there now.’ I was determined not to tell him where Jeanne Beauclerc was off to; I had assured Hugh there would be no policemen following her there.

‘Aye, you’re doubtless right,’ said Reid. He reached under the counter and drew out his hat. ‘At least, I can come and get her bags. Eh? Might be something in them, like a wee clue.’

‘Ahhhhhh,’ I said. ‘Yes, Miss Lipscott’s bags, actually, are gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yes, I um, yes.’

‘But you found them. Where did you put them?’

‘I left them where they were,’ I said. ‘Yes, I let it be known that I was sniffing around the luggage room where the bags were sitting and then I just left them there. Someone – Miss Shanks is my guess – must have spirited them away overnight. Not my finest hour, I’ll grant you.’

‘But why would anyone want to hide the bags except for to make it look like somebody left when really she’s-’

‘In a barrel of brine in the larder?’ I said. ‘Or hidden under a pile of coke in the boiler room?’

‘If I was a sergeant and had ma own say-so I’d be up there with a warrant. Ask that wee Shanks woman what the devil’s goin’ on.’

‘You couldn’t persuade Sergeant Turner?’

The noise Reid made was expressive if rather sickening.

‘Him!’ he said. He took his hat off again and threw it under the counter. ‘He cannae see there’s anything to bother about. Even though I’ve never smelled a rat like it since the Pinminnoch Burn flooded and one the size o’ a dog washed in tae ma Auntie Margaret’s privy.’

‘You paint a vivid picture,’ I said, shuddering. ‘Cissie will return to you for your silver tongue if nothing else, I’m sure.’

And so to Stranraer library, to sneeze and itch my way through a morning with the newspapers of nine years before looking for the death of ‘Charles’ who was auditioning for the part of No. 3.

It was not one of Andrew Carnegie’s bequests, but was easily as solid and massive as if it had been, heavy with pillars and porticoes without and even heavier with marble and gilt banisters within, and I swept into the reference room blithely confident that they would have exactly what I was seeking.

The woman behind the reference desk, however, soon took the wind out of my sails.

‘The Times, madam?’ she said. ‘The London Times? The English one? No, there’s no call for that here.’

‘But it’s…’ I said, and stopped myself before saying that it was the newspaper. A reference library not keeping The Times was like a cheese shop which did not sell cheddar. ‘Which national newspaper do you carry?’ I finished.

‘The Scotsman,’ said the librarian and dared me to comment on it.

‘Ah, excellent,’ I said, not convincing her for a second. ‘Could I see The Scotsman for 1919, please?’

‘Which month?’ she asked, drawing a slip towards her and raising her pencil.

‘All of them,’ I said, as she well knew.

‘Let’s start with Jan to Mar,’ she replied, scribbling, ‘and we shall see.’

This remark, impertinently hinting that I had no sticking power, made me determined to read every issue of the damned thing from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve, even though I had been quietly wondering how newsworthy a motorcar crash (even one in which a fine young man was burned to a crisp) could possibly be. Would such an event in Dorset or London trouble the doughty Scotsman?

As the porter was summoned and sent to fetch the first volumes, I turned back the cuffs of my coat and tied a silk scarf over my hair (I am without vanity when it comes to old newspapers these days, after many a mite and a ruined shingle) and when they were plonked down on the table in front of me with a puff of musty dust which would not have put a conjuror to shame, I was ready for them.

The first few took an elephant’s age as ever, until my eyes adjusted to the type and I began to see the pattern in the pages, the classified advertisements giving way to the political news, the society pages, the sporting triumphs and tragedies. By the time I was halfway through February I was so adept at finding the pages where such human interest snippets as a motorcar crash might be that more than once the librarian looked across and lowered her spectacles at me, concerned for the paper as I whipped it through my fingers in a blur.

And so, slowing down, I started to see the news I had been ignoring: the brand new National Socialist Party in Germany gathering steam even as the Treaty of Versailles lumbered towards its signing; the first reports of Herr Hitler’s Italian counterpart – the one whose name I always thought sounded like some new delicious pudding – joining him at his game. Hugh’s voice sounded in my memory again and, at least partly to silence it, the pages picked up speed once more. I turned aside a little to avoid the librarian’s eye.

It was not until almost the end of March that I spotted something to arrest my progress and when I saw the headline – TWO KILLED AT LOCH BROOM – the faint bell which had rung when Aurora said the name ‘Charles’ clanged again, this time more clearly.

I remembered that young man dying, although I could not have produced his name before the newspaper reminded me. As far as I could recall, he was a youngster who, after a riotous party, had attempted a Highland road in a borrowed and unfamiliar motorcar and had driven it into a forest of pine trees where it had burst into flames. The Scotsman said as much and not a great deal more, in its sober way.

In the early hours of Sunday morning past on the road at Corrieshalloch Gorge, Charles Leigh, 23 yrs old, and his fiancée Leigh Audubon, 18 yrs old, were instantly killed when their borrowed motor collided with a tree trunk, which happening caused an engine fire. The victims were identified by means of their pocket watch and cigarette case respectively. The motorcar, a Bugatti of racing type, was destroyed. No one else was hurt.

I shuddered, reading it, remembering the cigarette case and watch now that I had been nudged; everyone regaling everyone else with that detail in horrified delight or genuine horror according to disposition.

So this could not be the Charles Aurora had meant. For one thing, his fiancée had not killed him and become a schoolmistress: she had died with him, leading some hard-hearted sorts to murmur that perhaps a lifetime of being called Leigh Leigh was worth escaping.

On the other hand, Corrieshalloch Gorge was less than fifteen miles from Ullapool and across the sea loch from Ullapool was the Major’s hunting lodge. If Mamma-dearest had not sold it after his death (and why would she?) then that was a striking coincidence. Also, now that my memory was oiled and turning, I recalled a conversation with Hugh, relayed from George at the club, on the subject of this engagement which only came to light after the deaths. There had been some smirking, apparently – fiancée, indeed! – until the thought of the watch and cigarette case turned everyone solemn again.

I stared at the page until the tiny print and the yellowed background began to dazzle and I had to blink several times to clear my eyes again. Was I really going to ask the librarian to ask the porter to bring me Apr to Jun, Jul to Sep and then Oct to Dec, in hopes of another Charles who better fit the bill? I closed the March volume, and left the library, wiping the book dust from my fingers with a handkerchief.

There was no point in telephoning to Pearl again to find out any more, I considered, walking with measured pace along one of Stranraer’s main streets. Most assuredly there was no point in telephoning to Aurora. That left Mamma-dearest. Did I dare? She was a woman of fathomless tranquillity and the thought of disturbing it was unpleasant. Besides, if her other two daughters had managed to keep the news from her that Fleur was missing again, I did not relish being its bearer. There was also the consideration that even at my advanced middle age, Mamma-dearest Lipscott – being one of the most striking characters of my youth and never seen again since then – was still ‘one of the grown-ups’ to me. Quite simply, I shrank inside at the prospect of interrogating her, even gently quizzing her, as though she could still if she chose write to my mother to tell of my shortcomings so that the visit was spoiled with the dread of returning home.

To be fair, though, that had never happened at Pereford. I had not given my poor mother a thought the whole summer long, beyond sending her a picture postcard from Watchet and choosing a hideous commemorative china basket of roses with Dorset written on it in loopy gold writing. I do not think that I picked it out deliberately to offend her taste but when I saw her open the tissue-paper package, in her own sitting room surrounded by her hand-hewn oak furniture and her verdigris obelisks, and saw too the sudden wince as though she had bitten down on a boiled sweet with a bad tooth, I knew my mistake. There was no sign of it anywhere when we tidied her things after her death, certainly.

I could not help but contrast Mamma-dearest’s placid adoration of her own children’s efforts; her almost voluptuous joy in the pipe-cleaner and pine-cone families Fleur made for her, the tears she shed over Aurora’s piano-playing, claiming that she had never heard the Lieder sound more lovely. When Pearl painted her a watercolour rendition of the Major’s last battle, Mamma-dearest shot to her feet and rang a framer in Weston to get it behind glass immediately for preservation. It was a pitifully amateurish picture too, the paper bubbled with too much water and the bloody battle so tastefully toned down that, if one did not know, one would imagine those men in their bright clothes to be having a round of golf on that green hill. Still, the painting hung in her bedroom, the pine-cone family sat on her writing table and Aurora was invited to play Schubert at every party, while Mamma-dearest sat misty-eyed and seemed not at all to notice the other guests squirming.

I had walked as far as the station, and remembering Signora Aldo’s choice of kiosk from which to inform her husband she had left him, I thought I might as well make use of a telephone there. The privacy at the Crown was far from perfect, between the blackmailing widow, poor Enid at her elbow and the sisters Brown. I went to the newspaper-stand to buy a bar of chocolate and get some change (libraries, where even a peppermint is cardinal sin, always make me ravenously hungry) and then stood in one of the kiosks exhorting myself to courage, practising the opening line and casting around with mounting desperation for an excuse to abandon the plan. The tension was beginning to make my head ache (or perhaps I had tied the scarf over my hair too tightly) and when the operator demanded instructions I heard myself asking, instead, for a trunk call to the Horseshoe.

In the five minutes I was told it would take to string together this inordinately long line of connections, I wandered the station, noting the travellers reeling out of the boat train, still rather green about the gills, and the many passengers who seemed to be arriving with great heaps of luggage to cram onto a short train which sat pawing the ground and ready for the off.

‘You getting on the 10.15, madam?’ said a porter.

‘I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I’m in the minority, eh? Busy little train.’

‘Oh, she’s a wee beauty,’ said the porter. ‘Here to Glasgow for the Flying Scotsman.’

‘The Flying Scotsman starts at Edinburgh, doesn’t it?’ I said. This was one of things one knew about the railway even if one knew nothing else. The Flying Scotsman left King’s Cross at ten in the morning and left Edinburgh Waverley at one in the afternoon.

‘She does not!’ said the porter. ‘The Flying Scotsman starts in the fair city of Glasgow. Edinburgh is just one o’ the stops.’

‘Golly,’ I said. I had never known a porter so bursting with pride, and although I had no luggage and was not even boarding, I tipped him for his sheer joie de vivre. Then I checked the platform clock – it was just gone ten and my five minutes’ wait was up – and returned to the kiosk.

‘You sound as though you’re in a barrel of nails, Dandy,’ said Alec’s voice. ‘What a terrible line. Where are you?’

‘Stranraer station,’ I said. ‘Yes, you’re a bit gravelly too. How did it go?’

Alec began a tale which reached my ears as a series of clicks and buzzes with the odd word sticking up out of the noise like church spires in a low fog.

‘No use, darling,’ I said. ‘I can’t hear you. I said, I can’t hear you!’

There were more clicks and buzzes and all I heard was my name.

‘This is pointless,’ I bellowed into the mouthpiece and then some kind of madness came over me, I think. I slammed down the telephone (such an ungrateful wretch after the exchange had put the connection together for me so quickly), glanced at the clock – ten past ten – and went to seek my porter friend again.

By fifteen minutes past ten, I had sent another telegram to the Horseshoe with detailed instructions of what I wanted Alec to do, purchased a ticket, asked the Crown to hold my room and was sitting in the last first-class seat in the only first-class carriage on the little train, with the fire dying down to grey embers in my belly and the list of essential items I did not have with me growing in my head. Hairbrush, toothbrush, underclothes, warm coat, the comfort of knowing that my husband knew where I was and what I was doing, the comfort of knowing myself why I was doing this… What I did have was an almost new notebook, a couple of sharp pencils and hours and hours of luxurious time to organise my thoughts and discoveries so that I could fathom out this maddening case before its waters met over my head and it drowned me.