Bothersome Number of Corpses

10

When I stuck my head out of the window at York where we had a half-hour break for tea, Alec hailed me in great high spirits, waving a brown paper bag at me like a backbencher with his ballot papers.

‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘Hello, darling.’

‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘Toothbrush, toothpaste and a few delicate garments I got in a ladies’ outfitters.’

‘You went into a ladies’ outfitters and rifled through-’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I just murmured to the girl in the shop – something about my wife’s lost luggage, you know – and she picked everything for you. No idea what size, though. I said you were “average”.’

‘How flattering,’ I said. ‘Hairbrush?’

‘Ah,’ said Alec. ‘Well, you can borrow one of mine.’

‘And Nanny Palmer turns in her grave once again. But thank you, thank you and a thousand times thank you. Now we can use our teatime to have some tea.’

‘Better tea on the train,’ said Alec, displaying yet again the new concern with his own stomach which had been so very much to the fore in Joe Aldo’s and at the Horseshoe.

‘But at such close quarters one can’t talk freely,’ I said. ‘Come on, to the platform buffet with you and then we can go straight to the smoking lounge when the train sets off.’

We found a quiet table (or what passes for one amidst the hiss and clatter of the tea-making and plate-clearing which always go on apace in these settings) and over strong Indian and a plate of buns, I tried to explain to him what had come over me.

‘Demob fever after being sacked, perhaps. It’s lucky I’m not sitting on a sailor’s lap drinking stout from the bottle. No, in all seriousness, I think Pearl is too much of a hard nut for us ever to crack her. You possibly went a little tiny bit too far the other way with Aurora. So like Goldilocks we need to try the third one and steer a middle course. And I need to go back to Pereford where it all began. Something happened there, Alec, to turn Fleur from the child she was into the girl who became the woman she is now. And Mamma- Mrs Lipscott doesn’t know she’s missing. Pearl and Aurora are protecting her from the pain of it.’

‘But you think the pain might be useful if it joggles her into an explanation?’

‘Rather a brutal way to put it but… yes. Now, tell me about Taylor and Bell. I didn’t catch more than one word in ten on that nasty trunk line.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Alec. ‘Well, I’m more than happy to have done with the dread contraption for a while myself, actually, because I was fairly finely grated by various parties this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘I tried Lambourne first. Charming enough to bring the birds down out of the trees, if I say so myself, and got short shrift. I reminded the girl who answered the telephone that she had helped me earlier with Miss Blair and I asked – all chummy: I even remembered her name, which was Beverley – if she could work her magic again and put me in touch with the other two. She instructed me to wait and the next thing I knew some dragon was breathing fire down the line, demanding to know who I was and what I was up to and whether I wanted the police after me.’

‘Really?’ I said, arrested with a bite of bun halfway to my mouth. It fell off my fork and landed icing side down on the doily. ‘Why the dramatic change?’

‘I think Beverley must have casually mentioned my first enquiry and the dragon knows more about what’s going on at St Columba’s than she wants anyone else to find out.’

‘You could be right, you know,’ I said. ‘Miss Glennie did say that Lambourne positively courted her. That’s not how scholastic agencies usually go on.’

‘I suppose not. So Beverley must have been well warned what to do if I ever rang again and she did it.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Well, in for a penny in for a pound. I just plunged on and asked the dragon about Taylor and Bell anyway – hoping she’d say something useful if I rattled her – and I told her I didn’t mind if she called the police. In fact, maybe I’d call them to see if they could help me. And guess what?’

‘I give up.’

‘She slammed the telephone down. And when I got the girl to try the number again it was engaged and it stayed engaged from then until I left the Horseshoe.’

‘Hmph. So Taylor and Bell remain a mystery. Oh well.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ Alec said. ‘I did as you suggested, Dan, and got on to Somerville College. Stirred up a secretary.’

‘In a falsetto voice?’ I asked. ‘Pretending to be an old girl? I wish I’d been there to hear it.’

Alec blew a raspberry at me, attracting the glaring attention of a very respectable family at the next table who were eating ham and eggs as though stoking a boiler for a cold winter’s night.

‘No, I said I was writing an article on pioneering female scholars for a scientific journal and I particularly wished to speak to any of their early scientists.’

‘Which one was the science mistress?’

‘Tinker Bell,’ said Alec. ‘Do you know that was her nickname at Somerville too? So I was expecting some delicate little thing. Her voice down the line when I finally got through to her almost knocked me flat. I haven’t heard a pair of lungs like it since a fairground tout who made me drop my lolly when I was six.’

‘Down the line?’ I said. ‘You mean you actually spoke to her?’

‘And she’s still good pals with Miss Taylor too,’ said Alec, with a triumphant wiggle of his eyebrows. ‘But look, let’s powder our noses and get back on board, eh? I’ll tell you everything else on the way to London.’

‘Everything else’, though, did not get us much past the northern suburbs of Doncaster. We chose the smoking lounge in hopes of finding fewer ladies in there and in recognition of the shaming fact that gentlemen are less interested in others’ concerns and would not listen, and were so lucky as to find no ladies at all and only two gentlemen, both at one end of the car, both elderly, both reading, and both swaying with the movement of the train in a way that suggested they would soon be asleep. We settled ourselves into armchairs at the other end. Alec rummaged in his pocket and drew out not the usual equipment but a paper bag which he held out to me.

‘Pontefract cake?’ he said.

‘I’ve just eaten a bun,’ I replied. ‘And you ate two!’

‘They’re not really cakes,’ said Alec. ‘Pastilles, liquorice. A local delicacy. I got them while skulking outside your underclothes shop.’

I glanced at the two gentlemen but they were paying no attention.

‘Not bad,’ I said, tentatively rolling a pastille around my mouth. ‘Now, Alec, what of your two mistresses?’

At that, I rather thought one of the old gentlemen did stir. Laughing gently, Alec resumed his report.

‘Miss Bell is at St Leonards now,’ he said. ‘The secretary at Somerville was quite happy to tell me, and I caught her between breakfast and chapel which was handy.’

‘St Leonards, eh?’ I said. ‘Pretty hot stuff then, this Miss Bell. What was she doing in Portpatrick in the first place, one wonders?’

‘One wouldn’t have to if one would shut up and listen,’ said Alec. ‘She and Miss Fielding and Miss Taylor were at Somerville together.’

‘We knew that.’

‘And she and Miss Taylor agreed to join the staff of Miss Fielding’s new enterprise… not quite for old times’ sake, but certainly not for the advancement of their careers. The way she spoke made it sound like a kindness to an old friend.’

‘Quite a considerable kindness,’ I said. ‘How long would they have stuck it if Miss Fielding hadn’t died?’

‘Who can say, but Miss Taylor has returned to academia proper since she left St Columba’s. She’s currently in Greece getting excited about the deflation of the coinage in the ancient empire.’

‘Takes all kinds,’ I said. ‘So they what? They felt their loyalty was to Miss Fielding personally and dropped poor Ivy Shanks like a brick after the funeral tea?’

‘Again, if you would let me tell you,’ Alec said. ‘No. At least, they might have felt that way but they are both women of the stoutest ethical fibre and they would certainly have devoted as much more time as was wanted.’

‘But?’

‘It turned out that what was wanted was about six weeks. Six weeks after Miss Fielding died, they were both handed their pay packets and told to leave.’

‘Odd.’

‘Miss Bell said she assumed Ivy Shanks was in a fluster about money – she and Miss Taylor were on salaries commensurate with their great learning – and they offered to take a kind of furlough or whatever you would call it, while Miss Shanks got herself sorted out. Miss Taylor even offered to be a sort of acting headmistress and do the accounting. But no – they were thanked kindly and shown the door.’

‘In the middle of term?’

‘It seems so.’

‘And they just left their budding scholars and university hopefuls in the lurch?’ I said. ‘They could at least have stayed on in the village and given some extra tuition.’

‘I never thought of that, and Miss Bell never mentioned any guilt about the girls, actually. That’s odd too. In fact, she went as far as to say that she and Taylor – that’s how she referred to them both: Taylor and Fielding, like the army! – anyway, she said that she and Taylor felt a measure of relief that they were no longer to be stuffing Newton’s apple and the House of Tudor into the heads of a lot of farmers’ daughters who forgot it all every day over tea.’

‘Academic snobs,’ I said. ‘Some of the St Columba’s girls are really quite bright indeed. Thank goodness, in a way, that I didn’t get a chance to ruin them.’

‘So I’d say that Miss Shanks made a blunder in offloading the two of them,’ Alec went on. ‘But it wasn’t the fevered and frantic business of running away and scrabbling for an agency stand-in that it’s since become.’

‘Odder than odd,’ I said.

‘Passing strange and far from wonderful,’ agreed Alec. ‘But here’s something Miss Bell did say that’s interesting, Dandy. When I told her about Miss Glennie – late of Balmoral, as you say – Miss Bell said something like “maybe Fielding’s ways had rubbed off on Shanks after all”.’

‘What did she mean? Did you ask?’

‘I did, but all she said was that they had never blamed Miss Fielding for wanting a nursing matron she knew right there on the spot but they had always thought it a great lapse of judgement to make Miss Shanks an equal partner.’

‘I agree,’ I said.

Alec crossed his eyes and blew a big breath out of his puffed cheeks.

‘The more I hear the less I know,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the point of tracking them down was to make sure they’re not No. 5 and I’ve done that.’

‘Have you? Absolutely? Can we be sure Miss Taylor didn’t come back from Greece and drown?’

‘Yes,’ Alec said. ‘Miss Taylor apparently is fair-haired and five-foot-three. So No. 5 remains a mystery. How did you get on with No. 3?’

I told him the brief facts: the proximity to the Major’s lodge and the boy being the right sort of age and class to have been Fleur’s lover, but I told him too of the complicating factor of Leigh Audubon, the dead fiancée.

‘But you think no one knew about the engagement until after the deaths?’ Alec said. ‘Well, then. The Audubons would be more than happy to have it put about that the girl was engaged to him, considering she was alone with him in a car at after midnight, especially if they weren’t heading towards her home. And you say it wasn’t Charles Leigh’s Bugatti? And presumably it wasn’t Miss Audubon’s either, or they’d have said so. If it turned out that this car belonged to someone who can connect them with Fleur… or if Fleur was at the party…’

‘Let’s hope Mamma-dearest is in the mood to talk,’ I said.

‘You sound very scathing when you call her that,’ Alec said.

‘I don’t mean to,’ I replied. ‘It’s what the girls always called her. Maybe I’m getting cynical about them all and a note is creeping in.’

The steward came along just then, asking us if we would like the curtains drawn over since we were on the west side of the carriage and whether I would care for a foot-warmer and what we would each like by way of a drink before dinner?

‘We should do more of this, Dan,’ said Alec when the man had gone to fetch a whisky for Alec and a sherry for me. ‘Beats rocketing around in that little Cowley.’

‘Wait until we’ve got to Taunton,’ I said. ‘See if you still think so. One always forgets that the West Country isn’t just round the corner from London.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘I spent my childhood on the Cornwall sleeper getting to school and back again. It holds no secrets from me.’

He was, however, looking shattered and grey (as one always does after a night on a train) rather than pink and refreshed (the way the people look on the railway posters) when we arrived, with the milk, in Somerset the next morning. I had already had more than enough by King’s Cross and would have welcomed a night in an hotel, but there was no stopping Alec: he had bundled me into a taxi and we were at Paddington before I could object, then there were two good first-class sleeper tickets still available, which made it seem meant, and now here we were, flat of hair and gritty of eye, standing in the yellow mist of an early summer morning, wondering how best to get to Pereford and beard Mamma-dearest in her den.

‘Better to hire a motorcar here,’ I said, ‘than get to the nearest station and then find out they haven’t got one.’

‘We’re not in Scotland now, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘We’re back in the civilised world. Of course they will.’ It should have been touching to see how he drew down deep lungfuls of the air, as though it were his first proper breath since last he was this near home, but after my short and dreadful night’s sleep it was only irritating and I took a mean pleasure in hearing the porter tell him that there were no trains north for a good hour or more and Sir would be better in a motorcar if there were any kind of hurry about it.

‘Marvellous,’ said Alec. ‘Just the kind of cheerful helpfulness I’ve been missing. Not like that old misery on the Portpatrick dog-cart, eh?’

I decided not to tell him that a porter at Stranraer carried the whole timetable of his beloved railway in his head, but only nodded and followed him meekly to the hiring garage to let him pick.

Pereford. I had expected to find it changed; smaller-seeming, perhaps, or even run to seed in some way. I had fully anticipated that I would be forced to smile at my eighteen-year-old self and her besottedness with the place as the humdrum reality quenched the golden remembering. So when we turned off the Dunster road and swept between the gateposts, I steeled myself for disappointment. The avenue was the same, the branches just meeting over our heads and the new leaves exactly the yellow-green of the shoemakers’ elves’ little caps in the book I had read to Fleur at bedtime.

‘It’s just round this corner,’ I said to Alec and then as we turned it I gave a cry.

The roses were blooming, tumbling and scrambling all over the pillars of the verandah, and the path was carpeted with their petals. The lawns, their nap like velvet, rolled away to the edge of the trees and the marks from the gardener’s broom brushing off the dew could be seen in swathes. The pink-painted stone of the house was, as it had always been in early-morning sun, like the inside cheek of a seashell, blushed with peach; and at the windows, already open for the day, cream linen billowed out like the train of a wedding gown so that it seemed the house was waving a welcome at us as we slowed and stopped at the front door.

Our pull of the bell was answered by an elderly and rather stooping butler, who smiled with kindly enquiry.

‘We’ve come to see Mrs Lipscott, with apologies for the hour,’ I said. ‘But if you tell her it’s Mrs Gilver – I’m an old family friend.’

‘Of course you are, Mrs Gilver,’ said the butler. ‘Or Miss Leston, as you’ll always be to me.’ I squinted at him, felt the flicker of recognition and quarried deep and long for his name.

‘Higson?’ I said, at last.

‘Hinckley, madam,’ he replied, ‘but well done after all these years for getting that close! So Mrs Gilver and who shall I say, sir?’

‘Mr Osborne,’ said Alec.

‘Of Dorset?’ said Hinckley.

‘Bill Osborne is my brother,’ Alec said, visibly impressed.

‘If you would care to come into the morning room,’ Hinckley said, ‘I’ll tell Mrs Lipscott you are here.’

We followed him across the marble of the hall where more of the pink and yellow roses from outside were gathered together in bowls and in pots on pillars. Their scent – warmed by the light from the cupola floors above – was as sweet as honeysuckle already. I gazed about myself with growing rapture. There was the Fragonard (disputed) which we had all loved with girlish devotion. There was the Staffordshire pig with her ten little pink piglets which stood on the round table in the middle of the hall and under which we used to tuck the edges of notes to stop them blowing away. There were the three sketches of the house done by the three daughters the summer before I came to stay and framed as a triptych to stand on top of the library door.

Alec was in the morning room and had turned to face me.

‘You have a very misty look on your face, Dandy,’ he said.

‘The chairs!’ I cried. ‘The same chairs!’ I rushed over to the ring of armchairs grouped around the fireplace – four of them – where Lilah, Mamma-dearest, Pearl and I would sit, with Fleur on someone’s lap and Aurora, as she preferred it, sprawled on the rug waiting for the carriage to be brought when we were going out for the day.

‘Why shouldn’t they have kept their chairs?’ said Alec. ‘Do you think Mrs Lipscott will receive us or just send a response? I don’t fancy having to get firm with that sweet old butler.’

‘Oh, she’ll come,’ I said. ‘Of course, she won’t be up yet. If it were just me I daresay I’d be taken to her bedroom and have to sit amongst her letters and kittens the same as ever, but I suppose she’ll put on a dressing gown and come downstairs since it’s you too, darling. Alec?’

He was standing with his back to me over by a side-table.

‘Alec?’ I said again.

He turned and I saw that he was holding a photograph frame in his hands. He held it out towards me and I walked over. It was Fleur, grown-up but not yet grown sombre. She was standing with her foot up on the running board of a motorcar and her head flung back, laughing. Her hair was short already and had ruffled up in the breeze so that it was a blur around her.

‘I’d guess that would be about 1918 or so,’ I said. ‘Before.’

‘Oh, it’s certainly before,’ Alec said. ‘Look at the car, Dandy.’ I looked but shook my head. ‘It’s a Bugatti,’ he told me and our eyes met. He was breathing as though he had been running. Perhaps, like me, he had not really believed any of it until now.

‘Dandy?’ said a voice behind us. We turned and I could not help going over with both hands out to clasp those of the woman who had just entered the room. Mamma-dearest was probably older-looking to anyone who could look with an objective eye, but all I saw was the same mass of hair held up in a kind of hammock of net for sleeping, and the same pink flannel nightgown and pink silk dressing gown (cosy for bed and just a hint of decency in case I’m out in the garden and the vicar calls, she always used to say). ‘Dandy, my dearest darling.’ She wrapped me in a hug, smelling of lily-of-the-valley scent and mint tooth-powder. ‘What on earth brings you down here?’ Then she held me at arm’s length and beamed at me. I simply could not bring myself to say any of the things I should have said. Nor could I bear to soften her up with small talk and family news then turn the conversation later. I simply gave a dumb look at Alec.

He walked over and put the photograph between us, right under Mamma-dearest’s nose.

‘We’re here to talk about Charles Leigh,’ he said.

Any hope I had held that we were wrong drained out of me, just as the blood drained out of Mamma-dearest’s plump cheeks.

‘But… Charles was nine years ago,’ she said. All the colour was gone from her voice too and she spoke in a bleak near-whisper.

‘And Elf was eight years ago,’ said Alec. Mamma-dearest squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘And – I’m so sorry,’ I added, ‘but someone else died last week and Fleur…’

‘Has she gone off the rails again?’ said Mrs Lipscott, opening her eyes. ‘Do the girls know? They haven’t told me.’

‘They wanted to spare you,’ I said.

‘Did they send you to tell me?’ she asked. I started to answer no but Alec cut me off.

‘What happened with Charles Leigh, Mrs Lipscott?’ he said, shaking the photograph a little to make her look.

‘She bought it with her own money,’ said Mamma-dearest, hugging herself, putting her hands right up inside her nightgown sleeves. ‘On her eighteenth birthday when she came into what the Major had settled on her. I knew it was too young to settle money on them, but of course… And you can see how she loved it, can’t you?’

‘And the crash itself?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, miserably. ‘No one knows except Fleur.’

‘Tell us what you do know,’ I said gently. ‘Perhaps we can piece it together from there.’ She walked slowly over to one of the armchairs and dropped down into it. We followed her.

‘Well, after…’ she began, and then she cleared her throat and started again. ‘At the age of about seventeen, of course, Fleur took a great shine to the lodge. Ironic is the word, I think.’

‘Ironic how?’ I asked. Mrs Lipscott opened her eyes very wide in an innocent way and for the first time I did see that she was older now.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘It was as unlike Pereford as chalk and cheese and it was the Major’s house and Fleur never even met the Major.’ She turned to Alec. ‘My husband died in Africa when Florrie was a little baby,’ she said.

‘So she was at the lodge when Charles Leigh died,’ Alec said.

‘Why do you want to know all this?’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘And Dandy, why do you?’

‘Was she at the party with them?’ Alec said and I found myself wondering if he was always this brusque, if I was too when it was a stranger I was grilling, whether I only saw it now because Mamma-dearest awoke every tender feeling in me and made me see Alec’s manner in a new and unflattering light. It could not be denied, however, that it was working.

‘Yes, she was at that wretched party,’ Mrs Lipscott said. ‘The party Charles and Leigh went racing away from. You see, the thing about the lodge was that she could get up to all sorts of mischief unwitnessed; it was such a long way for us – the girls and me – to haul ourselves up there. Even if we heard tell of her escapades, which usually we didn’t. It’s quite out on its own.’

‘Well I remember,’ I said. ‘Hugh used to shoot with one of the neighbours. Highland neighbours – seven miles of bad road away. He insisted on dragging me along, naturally.’

‘Well I sold it in the end,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘After the accident – one of these anonymous bidders who buy up everything these days – and I’ve never missed it.’

‘Getting back to the night that Charles Leigh died then,’ I said. ‘Was Fleur engaged to him, as the Forresters think? Or was Leigh the fiancée, as reported?’

‘Oh, you’ve spoken to the Forresters, have you? Was it Aurora who asked you to come and speak to me?’

‘No,’ I said, crossing my fingers and hoping she would assume it was Pearl. ‘Was she?’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Lipscott, ‘I don’t suppose he was actually engaged to either of them. But since he was dead and would be marrying no one, the poor dear sweet boy, and since poor darling Leigh died with him, what would have been the use of exposing her to censure and Fleur to ridicule?’ Alec had been right then.

‘More than ridicule, Mrs Lipscott,’ Alec said. ‘If she killed them.’

‘She didn’t! She couldn’t have.’

‘How can you be sure?’ I said. ‘What do you know?’

‘Only that they were all together at the party, and that Fleur didn’t turn up at home until six in the morning and she was very bedraggled and smelling of smoke.’

‘Smoke?’ I said. ‘Cigarette smoke?’

Mamma-dearest gave me a look of fond pity. ‘Filthy black oily smoke, Dandy my love.’

‘And what did she say about it?’ said Alec. ‘That she remembered nothing?’

‘No, Mr Osborne,’ she said in the crispest tone I had ever heard her use. ‘She said she had killed them both. She said she was guilty of another two murders and she wanted to tell the police and go to court and be hanged.’

Alec had the grace to lower his head and after a quiet moment she spoke again.

‘But it was nonsense, of course. Apart from anything else, how could one person out of three make sure she survived an accident that killed the others? Anyway, we sent her away to rest and before too long she was better again.’

‘But not her old self,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘She hadn’t been her old self for a while, but she wasn’t even her new self after Charles. She was…’

‘I saw her last Saturday,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘Oh, my poor naughty little sprite,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘My cherub, my little pixie. Do you have children, Mr Osborne?’

‘We really don’t want to upset you,’ I said to her before Alec could answer, acknowledging with a rueful smile that we were a little late to avoid it now: her eyes were swimming with unshed tears and her hand shook as she put it to her throat. ‘But I must just ask one more thing. Fleur said on Saturday that she had killed five people. Charles and Leigh are two, Elf makes three and this last one is four. You yourself just said, of the crash, “another two murders”. So, who was the first?’

‘We know when it was,’ said Alec. I nodded and tried to look wise, even though I did not know what he meant. ‘It happened when she was seventeen, didn’t it? When she started staying away from home? And it was afterwards that she bought herself the motorcar and turned into a bit of a scamp by all accounts. That was what made her “her new self”, as you put it.’ I was nodding more eagerly now. ‘But who was it, Mrs Lipscott? Who did Fleur kill when she was seventeen?’ Mamma-dearest was shaking her head and her tears had dried again. ‘If we look through a year’s worth of newspapers,’ Alec went on, ‘will we find another death notice of a family friend? If we spoke to her acquaintances from that time and asked them if someone died unexpectedly, what would they tell us?’

Mamma-dearest was almost smiling now as she continued to shake her head.

‘My daughter killed no one,’ she said.

‘You’re very sure considering you don’t know the first thing about this latest corpse,’ I put in, and her smile was gone.

‘She didn’t, Dandy,’ she said. ‘Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that you don’t understand why she’s claiming any such thing and you can’t see how it was done.’

I glanced at Alec and although he told me, with a tiny shake of his head, to refuse to comfort her, I could not oblige him.

‘That’s more or less true,’ I said. ‘I mean she could have done it, but we don’t have the first inkling as to why. We don’t even know who it was.’

‘She didn’t do it then,’ said Mrs Lipscott and she sat back with a great rush of relief. ‘So is she still teaching? Or has she gone to rest for a while? It’s always so very upsetting for her.’

‘She’s… um… yes, she’s taken off for a bit,’ I said. ‘I gather you don’t speak every week on the telephone then? Or exchange frequent letters?’

‘I have had to let my little bird go, Dandy,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘I stand with my arm outstretched and my hand open and I pray that one day she’ll come flitting back again. It’s the hardest thing any mother ever has to do. To love and love and know that her child is alone and scared and won’t take comfort.’

‘It sounds absolutely unspeakable,’ I said. Not that my boys ever took much in the way of comfort anyway and if they knew that they were ‘loved and loved’ from near or from far they would make sick-noises and laugh at me; but sometimes in the night, when I could not quite silence Hugh’s voice in my head, I imagined one or both of them not in their dorm at school but in khaki in a foreign land with the sound of shells going off. Then I would remember the soldiers in the convalescent home – the ones who sat frozen, staring ahead (the ones who cried and accepted soothing words and pats on the arm were easy). I could rattle myself so badly that I would have to get up and go into their bedrooms and remind myself from all the model aeroplanes and frogspawn and cricket bats there that they were children, not soldiers, not yet; and since Hugh was wrong, not ever.

‘And now you must excuse me,’ said Mamma-dearest. ‘I am going to go to my room. I’ve just enough time for a good cry before breakfast. Nine-ish, Dandy darling, as ever.’ I had risen to my feet and made some ineffectual noises. ‘No, certainly not,’ she said. ‘A woman my age weeping is not a pretty sight. Take a walk in the garden, hm? The roses are lovely just now.’ She stood. ‘Of course, last week they were lovelier but that’s the way of it with roses.’

We did, in fact, step out of the french windows of the morning room and walk over the brushed grass to the rose garden. We went in silence but once we were through the arch in the yew hedge and strolling up and down the paths drinking in the scent, Alec started again.

‘Of course you could walk away from a crash that killed two,’ he said. ‘Drive the car quite gently into a tree and set light to the petrol tank with the others still in it.’

‘Oh, stop,’ I said. ‘I feel unspeakable, Alec. She obviously thinks her daughters sent me to help.’

‘You’ve investigated acquaintances before,’ Alec said.

‘These Lipscotts aren’t acquaintances,’ I told him. ‘They’re my dear, dear friends. And this place is… I can’t explain it, but I feel as though I’m trampling something precious underfoot.’

‘Best concentrate on the case then,’ Alec said. ‘Take your mind off it. Do you agree that Fleur could have caused the crash?’

I sighed. Of course, he was right.

‘Why wouldn’t Charles and Leigh just get out?’ I said. ‘They’d have to be drugged or extremely drunk.’

‘And of course no one ever leaves a party that way,’ said Alec. ‘I wish Mrs Lipscott would just tell us what she knows about No. 1, don’t you?’

‘I do. Then at least I could stop poking her with a stick and feeling as if I were baiting a wounded bear.’

‘Dandy,’ said Alec, in warning.

‘Yes, all right. Good work for knitting together all those little half-hints and catching her out that way. I knew something must have happened to turn Fleur into the little minx I saw at the party on Armistice night.’

‘Sh,’ said Alec, cocking his head. ‘She’s coming back. Maybe she’s changed her mind.’

But the woman who came round the corner was not Mamma-dearest, the same as ever in her pink flannel nightie. It was a woman of great age and great dishevelment with long grey hair hanging down her back in rats’ tails and an outfit composed of men’s twill overalls with a bathing suit underneath and down-at-heel dancing slippers on her feet.

‘You!’ she said. ‘You’re back. They’ve all gone now.’

‘Lilah?’ I said. ‘Batty Aunt?’ She gave me an enormous grin. Quite terrifying, since her teeth were few now and those remaining were not the teeth of which dentists dream. Her face was purple and pouchy with a wattle under the chin and fat yellow bags under each eye, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might not have been batty all those years ago, but sozzled. She was steady enough now, however, as she trotted up to us in her slippers and held out a hand to Alec.

‘Aunt Lilah,’ she said to him. They shook and then she clasped me to her and planted a kiss on my cheek which I could feel drying there and which made me itch to take out my handkerchief and scrub it away.

‘So what brings you back down here?’ she said. She had been fishing in the bib pocket of her dungarees and now she drew out a pair of secateurs and set to on the nearest rose bush. She was not exactly deadheading, since the blooms she snipped off were not at all faded. But neither was she gathering flowers for the house in any way that made sense, since the heads were let fall to the ground and then kicked away.

Alec waved his hand to get my attention and then gestured to Aunt Lilah in a very urgent-seeming way. I shook my head vehemently, determined that I would not grill this wandered (or drunk) old lady for secrets while her niece and protector was out of the way.

‘We came to talk about Fleur,’ I said and ignored Alec’s scowl. That was as far as I would go.

‘Oh, Fleur!’ said Lilah. She moved on to a second bush and attacked it with zeal.

‘Should you be doing that?’ I asked mildly.

‘She’s gone,’ said Lilah. ‘She left long, long ago.’ Then she held her secateurs up high in the air and snipped them together a few times before putting them back in her pocket and turning round. ‘She killed her father, you know.’ This was delivered in the blithe tone of someone imparting news that a friend had moved to town, or got a puppy, then she took off around the corner of the path, leaving us in dumb silence. After a moment the sound of snipping started up again. Slowly, Alec and I followed her.

‘Fleur killed her father?’ I said. ‘The Major?’

‘That’s him,’ said Lilah. ‘Johnny Lipscott. Yes, he died.’

‘But Fleur was a baby,’ I said.

‘Yes, a little baby girl,’ Lilah said.

‘And the Major died in Africa in the war,’ said Alec.

‘Oh, you knew that too?’ said Lilah, glancing round. ‘Yes, he did. Terribly dangerous place, Africa. You wouldn’t catch me there even for the elephants.’ In the distance the glockenspiel sounded its trill of notes. ‘Breakfast!’ she cried gaily, and again put her secateurs away. ‘Hope there’s some kedge.’ She left the way she had come.

‘What a very unsettling person,’ said Alec. ‘And what on earth did she mean?’

‘Let’s go and ask Mrs Lipscott,’ I said. ‘It does make sense of one thing though – why it should be “ironic” that Fleur took a shine to the Major’s hunting lodge.’

‘But he died in battle,’ said Alec. ‘That’s not the kind of thing you can make mistakes about.’

‘What if he was missing, or if his body was misidentified and he made it home and lay low and years later…’

‘I’ve been in the army, Dandy. If they list someone as dead, he’s dead. Let’s go and see what his widow has to say.’

They were in the little breakfast room with the Chinese wallpaper of yellow pears and blue doves, and there was indeed kedgeree into which Batty Aunt Lilah was tucking with enormous relish.

‘Coffee, eggs and things…’ said Mrs Lipscott waving a vague hand. ‘Are you staying, Dandy? Would you like your old room? And you, Mr Osborne?’ She blinked. ‘I haven’t quite accounted for you yet, I must say, but you’re very welcome, naturally.’

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. Again her hand fluttered at her throat, nicely dressed in pearls now above a very pale pink jersey of soft wool. She was right about the crying, though: her face was sodden and crumpled and looked ten years older than it had when we arrived, no matter the soft pink wool and pearls chosen to help it.

‘Batty Aunt Lilah just told us something quite surprising,’ I said. Lilah dropped her fork with a clatter, but Mrs Lipscott leaned over and patted her arm, giving her a warm smile.

‘Don’t worry, Aunt,’ she said. ‘You could never say anything that would make me cross with you, my darling.’

‘Try this,’ said Alec, rather grimly. He had not even taken so much as a cup of coffee, I noticed. ‘She told us that Fleur killed the Major.’

‘I’m going to finish this in my room,’ said Lilah, picking up her plate and her cup of milk and beetling off at top speed.

‘I’m not angry with you, my batty old aunt,’ Mrs Lipscott shouted after her. Then she turned back to Alec and me. ‘And so now you see how I can be sure she didn’t kill Elf or Charles or Leigh or this new one either.’

‘I don’t know about you, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘but I don’t see that at all. Perhaps, Mrs Lipscott, you would care to explain.’

‘You’re terribly earnest for an Osborne,’ she said. ‘I was at a hunt ball with your father once – before he married your mother – and he was much more fun.’ She gave her dimpled smile a good airing in Alec’s direction but, when it was met with a blank look, she sighed and held up her hands in a gesture of defeat.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Here’s what happened. When Aurora was due to be born in ’84 the Major was in India and he wanted to go to Egypt to join in the fun, but he came back for the birth of his son and organised bonfires on all the headlands and a huge party for the staff and the village, and of course no son came along. The bonfires were dismantled and the staff were told to go back to work and the Major returned to India. In ’87 when Pearl was born the whole thing happened again. He sailed home, built bonfires, organised parties and then took one look at her and went to Plymouth to get on a ship. Now in 1898 when I told him a third child was on its way, he refused to come back. He stayed put in East Africa where he was stationed, saying if it was the longed-for son at last he’d come home and if it was another benighted daughter he was off to fight the Boers in the South. He was long past the age where he had to keep his commission by this time, you understand, so it was his path to choose.’

She paused and looked at us as though expecting comments. Since the only one I could think of was that if he had not kept storming back off to the army in a huff at every daughter there would have been a higher count of babies in total and he would no doubt have got his son in the end, I said nothing.

‘So I sent word that it was another darling beautiful little baby girl and he promptly departed for the war and got himself killed there. After that the four of us and – and after Lilah came, the five of us – were just as snug as an infestation of bugs in a rug and all was delight and merriment.’

‘After your grief subsided, of course,’ said Alec, not liking – as a soldier himself – to hear that the Major was not mourned by the women he gave his life protecting.

‘Oh well, you know,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘Anyway, Fleur was always the most fanciful little thing in the world, wasn’t she, Dandy? And when she was getting quite big and almost finished with lessons she started thinking about coming out and getting engaged and getting married and all that and she became quite sorrowful at the thought of having no father to give her away. She started imagining it must have been dreadful for me to have no husband and I said that she shouldn’t think that for a moment and that I would rather have her than my silly husband and some silly son. I wasn’t thinking. She asked what I meant. And I told her. All I had in my mind was that if she heard what a ridiculous man her father was she would stop missing him and stop fancying that I missed him. Of course that’s not how she took it at all. I remember it as though it were yesterday: her standing poker-straight and as white as a sheet in my bedroom and staring at me with those beautiful eyes. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that I killed my father by being born?” “No!” I shouted. “An Orangeman with a bayonet killed your father by sticking him in the tummy.” But there was no consoling her.’

‘And that’s when she started her wild years?’ I said.

‘The Bugatti, Charles Leigh – who was very fast – frocks so short you’d think she’d forgotten to put one on. All those horrid parties with everyone smoking nasty things and being sick. She had decided she was a wicked girl and so she thought she’d jolly well behave like one.’

‘And why didn’t you just tell us this?’ said Alec.

Mrs Lipscott gave a carolling little laugh. ‘Oh, Mr Osborne, no one likes to say there’s that in the family.’

‘That what?’ I said.

‘Mania, madness, whatever they’re calling it now. I didn’t want anyone to know that one of my girls wasn’t right in the head.’ I frowned and shot a quick glance to the door where Batty Aunt Lilah had exited with her kedgeree.

‘Oh, but Lilah’s a connection by marriage,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘My uncle’s wife. No blood relation at all to me. I couldn’t bear the thought of Florrie-mittens being called nasty names and having to go to some dreary hospital somewhere.’

‘Although it came to that in the end,’ I reminded her gently. ‘More than once.’

‘She wanted to turn herself in, Dandy,’ said Mrs Lipscott, leaning forward in her chair to look pleadingly into my eyes. ‘After Charles, I mean. After Elf we couldn’t take the chance.’

‘So, she’s never run off exactly like this before then?’ I said. She sat up and opened her eyes very wide. ‘We slightly overstated it when we said she had gone to recuperate. We don’t actually know where she is. No one does.’

‘She’ll go to the police,’ said Mamma-dearest, standing up and letting her napkin fall to the floor. ‘She’ll give herself up and be put away.’

‘I don’t think so, Mrs Lipscott,’ said Alec. ‘The police were right there when she disappeared. Almost as though it was them she was running away from.’

Mamma-dearest was shaking her head in a distracted way, fast enough to make her pearls rattle together on her neck.

‘No, no, you don’t understand Fleur,’ she said. ‘If she thought she’d done it she’d never try to duck out of it. Her whole life since Charles and Elf has been one long act of atonement. Taking herself away from men and from her family and living like a nun in that dreadful school. She said she was trying to keep as many girls as possible on the straight and narrow path.’

She went towards the door and paused before going out of the room.

‘Aurora and Pearl know about this, you say? I’m going to telephone to them now. We must find her. I shall never forgive them for keeping all of this from me.’

‘We’re for it, when the other two find out we came down here,’ Alec said once we were alone.

‘Unless Mamma-dearest talks them round,’ I said. ‘What did you make of all that?’ Alec went to the sideboard and began heaping rashers of bacon onto a slice of toast. He squashed the heap down with another slice, picked up this ungainly sandwich in one hand and rejoined me.

‘I’m relieved to hear what counts as “murder” in Fleur’s book,’ he said.

‘Yes, she might well be no more responsible for bodies two to five than she was for the first one. She’s ill, not wicked.’

‘Although we can’t be sure,’ said Alec through a thick mouthful of bacon and bread. ‘Perhaps her being mad – and she does sound mad, doesn’t she? – makes her more likely to have killed, not less.’

‘Killed all of them?’ I asked him. ‘After her father, I mean.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Alec. ‘Or given that what she heard about the Major was no more than an upsetting revelation, and even if Charles and Leigh were an accident – if, mind you, if – by the time she was out walking on a cliff edge with Elf she already thought of herself as a murderess. And her mother just said it herself: she set out to be the wicked girl she believed she already was.’

‘If only we knew who No. 5 is,’ I said. ‘I mean, Fleur must have known her, agreed? How can no one have missed the woman?’

‘We need to find Fleur and ask her,’ said Alec. ‘And here’s a thought, Dandy. Since the police know they’re looking for a particular boat now, they’ve probably found her, or traced part of her journey. Every harbour has a harbourmaster, after all. What is it?’

Clearly, my face was reflecting the sudden sick feeling I had inside.

‘I don’t think I told them,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Turner was being beastly and I know I didn’t tell him. Then Reid was flapping about Cissie and I told him about finding Fleur’s bags and losing them and about finding Jeanne Beauclerc and about them planning to run off and then Jeanne bolting too early and… that’s it. I didn’t tell them about the boat at all.’

‘But the chap who owns it…?’

‘No! That’s the thing. He’s got his eye on the endless mounting up of the late fees. He’ll never tell them. Oh God, what a chump I am.’

‘Do you think Mrs Lipscott would let us use her telephone if we say it’s to help Fleur be found?’

‘Not after she’s spoken to Pearl,’ I said. ‘And think of who we’d be asking to find her!’

‘Could we go to the local bobbies here? Or the coastguard? Nearest harbourmaster?’

‘We could try,’ I said. ‘But would they care? Do you think Fleur’s description – her lines, Reid called it – was broadcast all the way down here?’

‘Doubtful,’ Alec said.

‘I think we need lay it all out for Constable Reid,’ I said.

‘Another trunk call?’ he asked. ‘Let’s hope for a better line.’

‘Perhaps we’d have more chance if we go back and tug his sleeve until he listens. And it’s not as though there’s any tearing rush, is there? She’s been gone since Saturday. If she were going to kill herself she’d have done it by now. If she went and holed up somewhere she’ll still be there for the police to find her.’

Just too late I saw Alec’s eyes flash and I turned around to see Mamma-dearest standing in the doorway. Her face was whiter than her pearls.

‘Have you any idea how you sound?’ she said to me.

‘Mamma-’ I began, but her eyes narrowed. ‘Mrs Lipscott,’ I said, ‘you weren’t supposed to hear that.’

‘I thought you were our friend,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been defending you to Pearl even though you tricked me into thinking she’d sent you.’

‘Not exactl-’ I said.

‘If she killed herself, or if she holed up and can be caught by policemen! As though it’s a game.’

‘We speak very matter-of-factly when we’re trying to get a hard job done well, Mrs Lipscott,’ said Alec. ‘It doesn’t mean that we’re not desperately concerned to see a just outcome.’

‘A just outcome!’ said Mamma-dearest. ‘No matter who gets swept away by it. I think you should leave now, both of you. Just leave us alone.’

As we hustled and jumbled ourselves out of the breakfast room, through the hall and onto the doorstep, and heard the front door slam firmly shut behind us, Alec was almost laughing; but I felt a bulge of misery inside me that I could not bear. To have been thrown out of Pereford and told never to return! To have been cast off by Mamma-dearest with such disgust for me in her face and voice!

‘Don’t look like that,’ Alec said. ‘It’s not the first time we’ve ruffled feathers, not by a long chalk.’

I nodded glumly, but he did not know what I had lost if I had lost the Lipscotts. I bowed my head as the hired motorcar wound down the drive past the roses and brushed lawns and into the avenue, fearing that if I looked I would see a bench or pond or summerhouse and remember a sunny hour spent there with the closest I had ever come to sisters (except my real sister, who fell far short of my imaginings), being told I was clever and beautiful and funny and that my life would be a happy charm. I dreaded the prospect of rewinding our yesterday’s journey all the way, Taunton to London, London to Scotland, those endless empty hours ahead of me for the miserable thoughts to outwit my attempts at control and send me into a fit of self-pity and weeping.

Thankfully, the after-effects of a night on the sleeper descended within minutes of the first train moving and it was not until we were slowing at Paddington that I lifted my head from Alec’s shoulder and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘My neck seized up at Frome but I didn’t like to disturb you. Are you feeling any better?’

‘No,’ I croaked. ‘Worse.’ I sat up and stretched. ‘And the only thing to be done about it is to solve the case and restore poor Fleur to her family.’

‘And if solving the case sends her to the gallows?’

‘Let’s cross our fingers that it won’t,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’

So on the Flying Scotsman, once the pudding plates were cleared after luncheon, I took out a notebook and spread it on the tablecloth beside my coffee. I ignored Alec’s groans of protest.

‘Yes, I know what you think,’ I said, ‘but it helps me organise things.’

‘No wonder you took to the classroom with such gusto,’ he said. ‘What things are you organising anyway? Nos. 1 to 5?’

‘You do the corpses,’ I said, opening the book to the middle and tearing out a double sheet from around the stitches. ‘I’m going to concentrate on the mistresses.’

‘What about them?’ Alec said. ‘Beauclerc, Blair, Taylor and Bell are accounted for. Do you mean Fleur?’

‘I don’t know what I mean,’ I said. ‘And I hate that. Now, keep quiet and let me think, please.’

‘I will in a minute,’ Alec said. ‘But when you say “do the corpses” what do you mean? Do what with the corpses?’

‘Tabulate,’ I said. ‘Cross-refer. You know… organise.’

Miss Fielding, I wrote in my book, Miss Taylor and Miss Bell. Three members of Somerville College. Miss Fielding and Miss Shanks, two friends who started a school. Miss Lipscott and Miss Beauclerc, whom Miss Fielding employed and who stayed for some time after her death. Miss Blair whom Miss Fielding employed and whom Miss Shanks sacked. Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher whom no one sacked. Miss Glennie whom Miss Shanks employed and had not sacked yet, unlike Miss Gilver who found favour and lost it again in a day. And Miss Lovage, with money invested. And Anderson the handyman, who wanted to keep his cottage. And Mrs Brown the housekeeper and cook, friend of Miss Shanks and known to Miss Fielding, who was very solidly still there and going nowhere.

I stared at the list of names.

Who employed Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher? I wrote. I did not know but I made a private bet with myself that it was Ivy Shanks who introduced them. They, like she, were comfortable and happy there. Mrs Brown was too. Miss Glennie was not and to say that Fleur and Jeanne had been uncomfortable was rather understating matters.

Waifs and strays, I wrote. Glennie, Beauclerc, Lipscott.

Independents, I wrote. Lovage, Taylor, Bell. Blair? Brown?

I turned to a fresh page and set down in thick capital letters the central puzzle of St Columba’s School. IVY SHANKS. And the floodgates were opened.

Why does IS keep letters in her safe?

Why did IS employ DG and then sack her?

Why is IS not suspicious of Miss Glennie’s supposed history?

Why was IS in a tizz about French and not about science or history (or English)?

For she had been. That first night I met Miss Shanks on the terrace she had been beside herself over the emergency of finding a new French mistress and there was Fleur Lipscott who spoke perfectly good French and knew how to teach. Why could she not take over ‘double duties’ as Miss Lovage called it, just as Barclay and Christopher had had to do?

Questions beginning with ‘why’, however, were not the sort which could be cracked on a train with paper and pencil. Organising was no good for why.

Order of departure, I tried next. Fielding, Blair, Taylor/Bell, Beauclerc/Lipscott (planned), Beauclerc, Lipscott (actual).

The order of arrival I did not know.

How about subjects? Latin was lost when Fielding died. Science and history and PE with the first round of sackings. French and English with the hasty departures. Geography and maths had suffered no interruptions at all. I put down my pen and stared out of the window at the rolling green hills sweeping by.

What had I seen and forgotten at St Columba’s? What had struck me in the subconscious when I was thinking of other things and was now lurking unobtainable in some dusty corner of my brain?

I picked up my pencil again and began a list of oddities, hoping that one of them would snag the memory and bring it to the surface again.

Grace, bathing pool, cocoa, late start, supper in dorms, loafing around in gardens, teachers making own beds. In fact, teachers appearing to work a great deal harder than any of the girls, as far as I could see.

‘Good grief, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘Do you know you’re huffing and puffing like a hippo in a mud wallow?’

‘How are you getting on?’ I asked him.

‘Dreadfully, I think,’ Alec replied. ‘Although since I don’t know what I’m supposed to be achieving, perhaps I’m getting on quite wonderfully.’

‘Well, what have you got?’

‘I’ve set out cause of death, characteristics of victim, relation to suspect and suspect’s reaction,’ he said. ‘For instance, battle, fire, fire, drowned, drowned. Man, man and woman, man, woman. Is this the sort of thing you mean? Father, lover and friend, lover, who knows.’

‘Suitor not lover,’ I said. ‘For Elf.’

‘Off the rails, threat to confess, claim of amnesia, flight. If there are patterns there I can’t find them.’

‘Africa, Highlands, Somerset, South of Scotland,’ I added.

‘Well, Irish Sea,’ said Alec. ‘There’s nothing there, is there?’

‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘Except you didn’t really go far enough with Fleur’s reaction to events. When she heard about the Major she went off the rails, that’s true. When Charles and Leigh died, drunk in a fast car after a fast party – a very off-the-rails death – she went back to her family. Elf died while she was with her family and she left them, went to where there were hardly any men at all and no chance of romantic entanglements, and when No. 5 happened there…’

‘She went somewhere we don’t know,’ Alec said. ‘Not back to her family – that didn’t work last time. And presumably not to another girls’ school since it didn’t break the curse either. And she’s hardly likely to go on another bender like a flapper girl. Not at thirty. By golly, Dan, I think I’m beginning to see the point of this. It does help one…’

‘Organise?’ I said, trying to make my smile not too smug.

‘So where would she go to be even more safe and cloistered than she was at St Columba’s?’

‘Cloistered. Hm,’ I said. ‘An out-and-out nunnery? More Ophelia than Juliet, after all?’

‘I wonder which heartbreak it was that earned her the nickname,’ Alec said. ‘Charles or Elf?’

‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘Listen, darling, I’m thinking. I know I was very offhand about suicide – God, I’ll never forgive myself for Mamma-dearest hearing me! – but something’s occurred to me. She fled.’

‘Yes,’ Alec said.

‘She took flight. She’s never done that before. I mean, removing herself from her family’s care and starting her wild time must have been a gradual thing, mustn’t it? She didn’t go to bed a good girl the night she found out about the Major and wake up a bad girl in the morning. And she went to a sanatorium after Charles and after Elf. Presumably she took a bit of time deciding to be a schoolmistress too and did some rudimentary preparation for it. This time, though, new future planned, all set to take Jeanne Beauclerc home to Pereford (I wonder why she didn’t tell her mother?), she abandoned everything and simply fled. That can’t have been guilt.’

‘Fear of discovery?’ said Alec.

‘What discovery?’ I said. ‘No one knows who No. 5 is and we haven’t been able to come up with a single scrap of evidence that Fleur had anything to do with her murder. She can’t have felt the noose tightening.’

‘But scarpering like that and leaving Jeanne Beauclerc in the lurch does look like fear,’ Alec said. ‘So if not fear of discovery, arrest, conviction and hanging, because she didn’t really kill No. 5 in the legal sense, then what?’

‘Not in the legal sense, no,’ I said slowly. ‘But if she felt that she killed her father purely by being born, she might have felt that she killed No. 5 because she put the woman in harm’s way quite inadvertently.’

‘Yes, of course!’ said Alec. ‘Which makes perfect sense of her saying “Five” like that when she saw the corpse!’

‘Oh, hallelujah! At last!’ I said. ‘She already felt she was putting this person at risk of harm and when she saw the corpse she knew that the harm had come.’

We beamed at one another.

‘But we’ve got side-tracked. What did she fear? Why did she run away?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Alec with a quiet thrill of triumph in his voice, ‘because she knew where the harm had come from. She didn’t kill No. 5 any more than she killed No. 1, but-’

I joined him and we spoke in chorus.

‘She knows who did.’

‘And,’ continued Alec, ‘she thinks she’s next.’

‘So she didn’t dare take Jeanne Beauclerc along.’

‘We have to find her,’ Alec said. ‘And it is pretty urgent, after all.’