Bothersome Number of Corpses

12

My fingers ached all the way up to my shoulders from gripping the back of the seat in front of me as the little motorcar swung around the bends and sailed up and over the bumps in the road.

‘You all right back there, Dan?’ said Alec, looking over his shoulder. I nodded.

‘I’m too tense to be sick,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday anyway.’

‘Mind and not faint on us, then,’ said Reid. His eyes were trained on the road ahead, peering into the small patch of light his headlamps made on this twisted lane under the trees.

We flashed past a sign for Ullapool, the white wood just gleaming enough for the black letters to show up against it.

‘Not far now,’ I said. ‘How could anyone live all the way out here without a telephone these days?’

‘And no answer to the telegram boy,’ Alec reminded me.

For all our desperate efforts to get to Fleur some way – any way – quicker than chasing off in belated pursuit of Aldo had failed. Sergeant Turner stared us down to sheepish silence when we tried to tell him that the corpse was Mrs Aldo, that both the witnesses who claimed not to know it had known it perfectly well, that the lover on the headland was the husband, that the wife on the telephone was the lover, that the girl whose family sold the house had bought it…

‘Oh aye?’ he had said. ‘And where does the French one in the farmhouse fit in?’

‘I don’t know,’ I had said.

‘She doesn’t,’ said Alec. ‘That’s a separate matter completely.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Sergeant Turner again. ‘See, to my mind, when you’ve finished a puzzle – a jigsaw puzzle, say – you’ve no bits left over. That’s how you know you’re done.’

So he would not telephone to the nearest constabulary and have them send a man to the lodge and he would not countenance a trip in his precious police car and he would not give Reid a sudden afternoon free. He fixed the lad with his terrier-like scowl, brows down and eyes glinting, and told him to get himself round to the grocer’s shop at the bottom of Main Street where a parcel of bacon had gone missing from the boy’s basket and was yet to be found.

Alec and I had been waiting at the station for the next train to Stranraer and the hope of another hiring garage when Reid had hurtled up in an ancient little Mercury and summoned us with a long blast on the horn.

‘Whose is this?’ I asked, scrambling myself into the tight space of the spare seat behind the driver. There was no chance that Alec could fold himself into it, I knew.

‘Mrs Turner’s,’ said Reid. ‘Cissie pinched the key to the garage door for me.’

‘You’ll both be sacked for sure now,’ I said.

‘Yup,’ said Reid and, turning out of the station brae, he roared off up the hill to join the road to Stranraer, Girvan and points north as if the hounds of hell – and not just Sergeant Turner and his formidable wife – might be after him.

There had been moments of calm, even passages of conversation, and in the course of bumping along the terrible Highland roads, at last the pieces of the St Columba’s puzzle had fallen into place. With nothing left over, as Sergeant Turner so rightly decreed was the way of things.

‘It was nothing to do with Fleur and the murders,’ I told Reid and Alec. ‘Not really. Except that Fleur’s guilt was why she was there. She wanted to get away from men. She thinks she killed her father and two lovers, remember.’

‘Thinks she did?’ said Reid. I ignored him.

‘And Miss Fielding took in waifs and strays. She took in a girl who said she’d killed her lovers and she took in the daughter of a noble French family who’s done something naughty enough to be disowned. Second chances, see? The key is that the women at that school either brought money – Shanks, Lovage and Fielding – or they brought learning – Taylor, Bell and Blair. Or they were waifs and strays. That’s Fleur and Jeanne. And recently Miss Glennie, too. The Lambourne Agency is obviously in on the operation, seeking out likely candidates for Miss Shanks. And the Misses Christopher and Barclay are very much her lieutenants in it all. The point wasn’t that Miss Glennie used to work at Balmoral, you see. The point is that she was sacked from Balmoral. For something. Something that means she doesn’t have up-to-date photographs of her mother and father even though they’re still alive.’

‘Disowned again?’ Alec said. ‘What for this time?’

‘Well, she has lots of snaps of a child,’ I said. ‘She said it was her brother but now I think it was most likely her son.’

‘That would get a governess sacked right enough,’ Alec said. ‘But why would it get her a job in a school?’

‘Blackmail,’ I said. ‘Plain and simple. Barclay and Christopher are doing something for Miss Shanks that Miss Taylor and Miss Bell – scholars of depthless integrity – would never do. And something Miss Blair – as the PE mistress – couldn’t do. Once Miss Glennie submits, they’ll have such a hold over her that she’ll work for nothing. Shanks thought Jeanne and Fleur could be persuaded to do the same but it turns out she was wrong. They were made of finer stuff; they held out as long as they could and then, when Jeanne could bear it no longer, they hatched a plan to escape from her.’

‘Ah,’ Alec said. ‘That’s why they had to go away and hide. She would have told the world of their sins if they’d just resigned.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘But what did she blackmail them into doin’?’ said Reid.

‘I didn’t work it out until Parents’ Day, today,’ I said. ‘They were doing various things. Or at least two different sorts of things for two different sorts of girls. And it all begins with cheating.’

‘Girls cheating?’ said Alec.

‘No, but parents being told that girls cheat,’ I said. ‘Parents like the Rowe-Issings and the Duncans being told that their daughters are cheats, but that Miss Shanks will keep it quiet in return for testimonials, swimming pools and stables, that kind of thing.’

‘But some of the girls are genuinely bright, aren’t they?’ Alec said.

‘Yes, some are,’ I answered. ‘Sabbatina Aldo is and she’s of no interest to Ivy Shanks at all. I never could work that out. Why a scholarship girl with a fine brain was not the toast of the staffroom. Now, you see, the girls who’re going to university from St Columba’s all come from very solid middle-class backgrounds. Those parents wouldn’t drop dead at the thought of cheating as Basil and Candide would (not to a man, anyway) but they’d happily shell out for a bit of swanky advantage.’

‘That’s not fair, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You don’t even know any middle-class people. They’re the salt of the earth usually.’

‘I do!’ I said. ‘I know Inspector Hutchinson from Perth and I know Hugh’s estate factor. And I’m not saying all of them. No doubt Ivy Shanks has to go very gently to see who will be amenable and who would go to the police and daughter be damned.’

‘But you’re sure about the operation overall?’ Alec said.

‘I am. Because listen: the college-bound girls are going to read geography and history (Miss Barclay), science (Miss Christopher), and French. Hence the huge panic when Jeanne disappeared. No one is up for English – hence the huge lack of panic over the English mistress. Until, that is, Miss Shanks thought she had another sitting duck in me – wickedly living in an inn with a young man – and decided that Clothilde Simmons might be a whizz at English. Oh God!’

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘I accused that dratted widow of writing a poison-pen letter to Hugh,’ I said. ‘But of course it was Ivy Shanks testing the waters. It was when she realised that Hugh couldn’t care less and neither could I that she sacked me. Oh my God, Alec! That widow-woman must think I’m insane!’

‘She’ll dine out on it for years,’ he said. ‘So the mistresses – the crooked ones – bump up the marks?’

‘Worse than that,’ I said. ‘I think they do the work. I never could understand why the mistresses were always burning the midnight oil while the girls were draped around like temple nymphs. Or why the mistresses were writing in black ink, and not red pencil. Or needed so many textbooks and dictionaries just for marking. Constable, if you shut down such a hotbed of blackmail and corruption, it might even offset the – um – borrowing of Mrs Turner’s motorcar.’

‘Depends what’s waiting for us at the other end o’ this,’ Reid said, and all my triumph at solving the riddle of St Columba’s was gone again. No one was dying there. No one was drowning. Nothing but fairness and justice was harmed. When I thought about Mrs Aldo and what might have been done to Fleur in the time Joe Aldo had had to do it, I fell silent again. My silence spread to the other two and now, in the moonlight, five miles from the lodge, all three of us were wound like watch springs, champing to be out of this rattling, fizzing little machine and dreading what we would find when we arrived.

‘Corner coming, right,’ I said and Reid made another of his sickening two-wheel turns. The chassis sounded like a falling load of scrap metal as the other two wheels hit the ground again. ‘I take it back,’ I said. ‘Alec please put the hood down and let me have some air.’

‘Midges,’ Alec said.

‘They can have me,’ I groaned. ‘There’s a crossroads in less than a mile, William. You want the left turn and it’s a sharp one.’

‘How come you ken this place so well, missus?’ Reid asked me.

‘Shooting,’ I said, through clenched teeth. ‘Friends of ours used to take the next place along for the deer.’ In truth, I knew the twists and reversals of the road because every time Hugh and I had travelled it I had sat in a mulish huff about the dripping black pines and the humpback bridges. I could not see the point of leaving Gilverton for somewhere – in my estimation – even worse.

At least it was not dripping tonight, and with the moon glaring down it was not really all that black either, but I anticipated something a great deal more hellish than dull company and a day’s dreary shooting at the end of the road.

‘Gates,’ I said, spotting them, and we were off the road with one final twist of the steering wheel and rocketing silently on the deep cushion of pine needles which covered the drive, down and down to the lodge at the water’s edge.

‘He’s here!’ shouted Alec, seeing just before I did the motorcar pulled off the lane at the edge of the carriage sweep. ‘That was Donaldson’s car for sure.’

‘Aye, he’s here,’ said Reid and for the first time I heard a shake in his voice, not only caused by the rattling up his arms of an engine under strain. We were old hands at this caper, Alec and I, but what did Reid know of chasing a murderer down in the night and capturing him?

‘House is dark,’ I said. The stones of the lodge were pale and glinting in the moonlight the way that granite can, but every window showed a black, blank gaze of emptiness. Reid killed the engine and the little Mercury, creaking and steaming, slowed and stopped on the gravel. We sat still and listened. The silence was absolute, a perfect endless silence with no breath of wind, no lap of waves, not so much as the call of an owl or the crack of a twig.

‘Has he a gun?’ said Reid and his voice, once again, was trembling.

‘Shouldn’t have thought so,’ Alec whispered back.

‘He’s had plenty of time to find the guns in the house, though,’ I put in and then wished I had not, for there we sat, the three of us, in a motorcar with the top down in the middle of the gravel in the bright blare of moonlight and any of those black windows could have Aldo behind them, watching.

‘Let’s get under cover,’ said Alec and opening his door he slid out and ran, hunched over and scuttling, into the shadow of the trees. I followed him, calling softly to Reid to do the same.

‘He can’t be in there,’ Alec said when the three of us were huddled under the draping arm of a cedar, breathing in the sweet scent of its bark and sharp tang of its needles under our feet. ‘He had a perfect shot at us then. Like wooden ducks at the fairground.’

‘Now he tells us!’ said Reid, with some of his old vigour. I rewarded him with a chuckle – anything to keep his courage up – and sat back against the tree.

‘So what shall we do?’ I said.

‘If we could find the gun room…’ said Alec.

I took a deep breath before replying. His suggestion, not quite made out loud but strongly implied, was a good one. I had never shot so much as a hare and the thought of shooting a man, even a man as conniving and evil as Giuseppe Aldo, was a monstrosity to me. William Reid too was surely too young to have been in the war and Alec’s plan would change his innocent life for ever if things went that way. But what else was there for it?

‘I suppose I should say that this place looks exactly the same as Corrie Dubh, up the road,’ I said. ‘David Bryce’s best Scotch Baronial. He turned them out like muffins, you know.’

‘Eh?’ said Reid.

‘I know where the gun room is at Corrie Dubh,’ I said. ‘So I think I could find it here. Of course breaking down the door will bring him running…’ I hoped that one of them would agree and stop me, but neither did.

So, still bent double and keeping close to the trees, I led them around the side of the house to the yard door. If I was right about the floorplan, the gun room should be just along the corridor beyond it. Internal, of course, no window to smash for entry, but the yard door had a top half of glass and Alec took off his shoe in readiness.

‘All right?’ he said.

‘Wait!’ I whispered. ‘Might as well…’ I tried the handle, turned it and the door swung open.

Alec laughed softly and put his shoe on again.

We had run out of luck, though. The gun-room door, although just where I thought it would be, was locked and the key nowhere to be seen. Alec sent Reid to the corner of the corridor as a lookout and shoved me into an alcove for safety and then, taking off his coat, he put his shoulder to the door and gave it a mighty thump. It sent him staggering back a few steps without emitting anything like a crack or splinter which would hint at submission.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘That was just a tester.’ I did not quite believe him, but with his next assault he took a run at the thing and made a kind of roar as he connected. With a metallic ping the lock gave way and the door burst open, sending Alec sprawling into the gun room to land heavily on his side. Reid rushed from the corner and I shooed him in like a mother hen, then followed, slammed the door and pulled a nearby cabinet in front of it.

‘God damn it to hell,’ said Alec, rolling on his back. ‘I think I’ve broken something.’

‘Your turn, darling,’ I said, thinking of the time I had skidded down a staircase in pursuit of a murderer and smashed my ankle. ‘What?’

‘Rib,’ Alec said, sitting up and groaning.

Reid was listening at the door.

‘No sound o’ nothin’,’ he said. ‘Mind you, it’s a big house.’

‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Reid, keep listening. I’m switching on the lights, but if you hear anyone coming you hiss and I’ll switch them right back off again.’ I clicked the switch and blinked against the sudden brightness.

The doors of the gun cupboards were all closed and the little cabinet – for shot – which I had moved in front of the door was padlocked. I went round swiftly, rattling the handles, and peering through the grilles.

‘There’s nothing missing,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s been in here.’

‘Good,’ said Alec. He shuffled over to a desk which stood near where he had fallen and hauled himself to his feet. ‘So he doesn’t have a gun. Pity, because I’m not up to a brawl this evening. Ow! Two ribs, at least. Bloody agony, but only if you breathe, as they say.’

‘So where are the keys for the guns?’ I said, wondering aloud more than asking.

‘Depends how fussy they are,’ Alec said.

‘No’ very,’ said Reid. ‘Wi’ that yard door not locked.’

‘Yes,’ I said. That was bothering me. I went out into the corridor again and along to where it stood open. I stepped out into the yard and crossed it. Beyond the gate a path led down to the jetty and I could see the sea loch, shining still and silver; high tide on a windless moonlit night and it was a mirror lying there. I gazed, then squinted, and then I began to run. There was a little boat out in the open and a figure in it, sitting so still that not a ripple disturbed the reflection of the moon in the water.

‘Alec!’ I shouted as I went. ‘Reid!’

The figure had heard me and moved, I knew, for all round the boat suddenly the perfect image of the moon and trees broke and shimmered. I ran to the jetty, right to the end and peered across the water. Behind me came the pelting footsteps of the constable and then Alec, shuffling and swearing.

‘Who is it?’ I said. ‘There’s only one. Is it Aldo? Has he killed her and taken her body out there to dump it?’

‘If he has, he’s put her frock on,’ said Reid. His young eyes had picked out more than mine. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed. ‘Miss Lipscott, you’re all right. We-’

Fleur stood and then even I could see it was her, in her dress with her hair down her back.

‘Fleur, darling,’ I shouted. ‘Row to shore- No!’

Fleur had gone. She had simply stepped over the side of the little boat and dropped into the water.

‘Alec, wincing, had started taking off his waistcoat and kicking out of his shoes, but his face was shining with perspiration and his breath was ragged.

‘Reid!’ I said, turning to where the constable stood frozen.

‘I cannae swim,’ he said. I could have slapped him.

‘You- You pick drowned fishermen out of the sea all the time!’ I shouted. ‘How can you not swim?’

‘Fisherfolk never learn to swim,’ Reid said. ‘It’s bad luck.’

I tore off my hat and coat, my dress, my shoes and my petticoats too and in my chemise and stockings, before I could give myself time to think, I jumped off the jetty into the icy water.

It was so cold that my shoulders seized up around my neck and I was only paddling forward by inches, so I turned on my back, looked up and prayed for strength and courage. I prayed to Hugh, who swam in Loch Ordie every morning between May and October, to Nanny Palmer who took a cold bath until she turned ninety and had a shower machine put in, and to my old childhood self, with Pearl and Aurora and Fleur, jumping in and out of the tide at Watchet all day long.

Then I turned back over and started swimming.

I warmed a little with the exertion, or numbed perhaps, but I made it to the boat anyway and rounded it. She had not sunk and was not struggling. I could see her floating face-down with her hair fanned out and that wicked, disgusting picture of Ophelia flashed in my mind once again. I swam up and grabbed her.

‘Floribunda, don’t you dare, you little monkey,’ I said through chattering teeth. ‘Your mother will die of grief and your sisters will never smile again.’

She had reared up, spluttering, and now she flicked her hair out her eyes and splashed frantically, trying to get away from me.

‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I killed him.’

‘You didn’t kill anyone, Fleur,’ I told her.

‘I killed him, I killed him.’

I surged forward and grabbed her round the neck under one arm, then I turned us both onto our backs and with my free hand I made for the shore. She was limp against me and I could hear her muttering on and on, through her chattering teeth: ‘I killed him. I killed him.’

‘You’re killing me,’ I shouted. ‘Try to swim, darling.’

I spoke lightly but I was terrified. My arm was heavier and weaker with every stroke and we were no longer on the surface but low in the water, our legs deep down into the chill. I took a breath and a mouthful of water came in with it.

‘Fleur, please!’ I begged, trying to shake her. She was a dead weight under my arm. I put my mouth beside her ear and yelled at her.

‘Sabbatina needs you!’

She flailed then and her head rose, but it was too late.

‘We’re sink-’ I said and the water closed over my head and I was falling.