Bothersome Number of Corpses

3

‘Four?’ said Alec. He did not notice as the sandwich he was holding flopped open and a slice of tongue dropped out onto the carpet.

‘Four,’ I said.

We were sitting in his room at the Crown (his rather than mine because it had a sweet little corner bow with armchairs which looked out over the harbour and seemed made for chatting) to where he had ordered up coffee and sandwiches, thinking my pallor when I banged on his door owed itself to hunger and exhaustion. In fact the exhaustion was not too far from the mark: it had been a long day on the trains and dinner with a hundred clamouring schoolgirls had taken its toll. Of course, the cold-water shock of Fleur’s announcement, swiftly followed by my stumbling, skidding descent of the cliff path in the bad light, had not helped matters any.

‘I’ve eaten,’ I had managed to say after he had replaced the house telephone.

‘It doesn’t seem to have agreed with you,’ Alec had said in reply.

Then I told the entire tale, beginning with Miss Shanks, taking in the missing mistresses and the startling change in Fleur – here we were interrupted by the sandwiches’ arrival, the girl’s eyes out on organ stops at the sight of me in Alec’s room, still in my hat and coat – and finishing up with Fleur’s whispered pleas for me to leave, her shouting out that odd way at the mention of bolting and finally her bombshell, the words which were still ringing in my ears even now.

‘She just said it, right out? “I’ve killed four people”?’ I nodded. ‘Then what?’

‘Not another word. Well, actually then she said she couldn’t say when it might happen again.’

‘My, my,’ said Alec. ‘And then?’

‘Nothing further.’

‘No, I mean what did you say?’

‘Nothing. Or maybe a few incoherent mumbles. I left. I fled.’

‘Hmph,’ said Alec, and it did seem pretty feeble sitting there in his room with a hot cup of coffee warming my fingers and the faint sounds of the public bar wafting up through the floor and in at the open windows.

‘Fair point,’ I said, although he had not precisely made one. ‘There were scores of girls who would have overheard a scuffle even if the mistresses were all still in the common room miles away. And I suppose there must be matrons and maids and what have you. Yes, all right then, I should have stayed put and grilled her. Perhaps next time.’

‘Mistresses,’ said Alec. ‘How many have gone again?’ I gave him a grateful smile: he had already forgiven me and moved on.

‘Five,’ I said. ‘That occurred to me too. But five mistresses have disappeared and Fleur definitely said her total – my God, how horrid – was four.’

‘So no reason to make the connection.’ Alec shivered too. ‘I suppose you believed her?’

I thought hard for a moment before answering and then nodded.

‘I believe she wasn’t lying,’ I said. ‘She might be mistaken – out of her wits – but it wasn’t mischief when she told me. It was more like a warning.’

‘Although,’ Alec said, ‘there is the point of her sister’s mysterious message. “Trouble in the past” that they thought Fleur had got over by now and a great dread that it would flare up again. I always wondered why they didn’t tell you straight what kind of trouble it was, but if it was four murders then it’s less of a puzzle.’

I gave a grunt that was as close as I could get to laughter. ‘Yes, I shall be having a sharp word with Pearl if I find out she sent me off to see if a murderer was about to murder again.’ Then I shook my head to rattle the idea out of it. ‘She can’t be, Alec. She simply can’t be. She used to decorate her dolls’ house for Christmas. How could she kill anyone? And how could she possibly get a job in a good school if she had been in prison for murder? And if she had done it four times why wasn’t she hanged? And why haven’t we heard about her? She’d be more famous than Dr Crippen.’

‘Only if she were caught,’ Alec said. ‘And is it a good school?’

I opened my mouth to answer and then stopped.

‘It has some awfully grand pupils for a bad one,’ I said. ‘And yet… five mistresses gone and the head is a funny little creature more like a… who she actually reminds me of is Batty Aunt Lilah. Almost one of the girls herself, and not at all suited to being in loco parentis.’

‘The way she bundled you in and let you loose on them in the dining room certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence in her judgement. No reflection on you, you understand, but you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Well, perhaps she was the matronly one and Fräulein Whatshername was the brains of the outfit.’

‘Who?’

‘The other headmistress,’ I said. ‘There used to be two until she died.’

‘Lifting our total to six?’ said Alec. ‘Six mistresses a-vanishing?’

‘No, she’s one of the five. She was the Latin mistress as well.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ Alec said. ‘What next? What first?’

Before I could answer there came a timid knock at the door and the same maid who had brought our supper entered.

‘Just – eh – wondered if you needed anything else, sir,’ she said. ‘And madam.’ Her eyes were rounder than ever.

‘No thank you,’ Alec said. ‘Here, take the tray, but I’ll keep the plate in case I’m peckish later.’

‘And can I turn down your bed while I’m about it?’ she said, blushing a little and somehow giving off the strong impression that she had been put up to this by a third party.

‘No thanks,’ said Alec again.

‘You could turn mine down,’ I said, losing patience with it all. ‘Two doors along. And I’d like some hot water too if it’s not too late in the evening.’ The maid bobbed and disappeared.

‘You asked me what I was going to do,’ I said once she had gone. ‘Am I to take it then that your desire to be part of the case has waned as the casualty list has swollen?’

‘Not at all,’ Alec said. ‘Not a bit of it. Only I can see now that you’re right. You’re much better able to infiltrate a girls’ boarding school than I.’

‘The pisky vicar has been roped in as Latin master,’ I said. ‘Could you turn your hand to… what was it… science or history, I think?’ Alec snorted. ‘French is taken. Music and PE. Well, I can see the problem with you teaching the girls PE. I don’t think the Rowe-Issings would stand for Stella learning rugger. Music?’

‘Triangle,’ said Alec. ‘And I sometimes got that wrong. And anyway, the fact is… while you were out I snagged a case of my own.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Do tell.’

Alec rubbed his nose and did not quite meet my eye.

‘It doesn’t have the thrill of yours, but then I didn’t know how thrilling yours would be when I agreed to take on mine. A schoolmistress in low spirits didn’t sound like too much fun, frankly. My case is much more tempestuous than that. Not than five missing persons and four murders, obviously. How untidy to have them not match up.’

‘Tempestuous?’ I said, cutting through the babble.

‘There is a seething tangle of dark passion here in Portpatrick,’ Alec said.

‘Hang on,’ I said, stretching out a toe and poking him. ‘A tangle of passion sounds exactly like the kind of case we said Gilver and Osborne would never stoop to.’

‘Needs must,’ Alec said. ‘Since I’m here. One of the good burghers of this fair town wants very much to know which other good burgher has stolen his wife’s heart from him.’

‘But we agreed!’

‘We might have said it would be nice if every case was a juicy one,’ Alec said. ‘But we never agreed to turn away business. I didn’t anyway.’ His look of triumph was not to be borne and I took myself off to bed in disgust, not missing the sudden scuffle that told me someone was waiting in the passage to see me go.

He started again over breakfast the next morning.

‘It’s not at all what we always said we would never do, anyway.’

Our breakfast table was very small and very close to the breakfast tables of everyone else currently staying at the Crown, to wit: three commercial gentlemen who greeted one another and then retired behind their newspapers, three amateur fishermen who sat together and talked of lines and tides and notable catches of old, and a convalescent widow with a companion, who nibbled daintily at soft-boiled eggs and spoke in murmurs. Alec and I attracted no attention at all from the six men but set the two women quivering with interest. The convalescent widow was in danger of letting her egg grow cold, all forgotten, so much effort was she putting in to catching my eye. Alec, leaning in close across the minuscule table, ignored them all.

‘He’s not asking us to check boarding-house registers to help him with a divorce,’ Alec insisted. ‘He just wants her back again. And a name. For his own satisfaction.’

‘And if he then decides it would be even more satisfying to go after the fellow with a meat cleaver? That wouldn’t trouble you?’

‘Filleting knife, actually,’ Alec said, but absently. He was looking over my shoulder.

‘He’s a fisherman?’ I asked, craning to look over it too. There was a mild commotion taking place in the doorway of the dining room. The little maid who had brought our supper last night, decked out to serve breakfast in a sprigged frock and cotton apron, was remonstrating with another figure who seemed determined to enter the room. A round little figure in a voluminous tartan cloak and a green velvet hat shaped like a hot cross bun: it was Miss Shanks and, despite the maid’s best efforts to protect her guests from the intrusion, she was even now striding towards Alec and me, throwing one wing of her cloak back over her shoulder.

‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, arriving at our little table and standing there – still rather swash-bucklingly – with her feet planted far apart and her hands on her hips. ‘And Mr Osborne, I believe.’

The commercial gentlemen carried on chewing their toast and reading their headlines; the anglers carried on with their reminiscence of some distant whopper; but the convalescent widow and her companion practically fell off their seats with curiosity and I could feel their two pairs of eyes fastened upon me like magnifying glasses in the desert sun, smouldering dry twigs into fire.

‘Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘Alec, dear,’ – a crackle from the twigs as the magnifying glasses flashed in horror – ‘this is Miss Shanks from St Columba’s of whom I told you last evening.’

Alec half rose and half bowed then sank into his seat again.

‘And how can we help you today, Miss Shanks?’ he said.

She regarded him very thoughtfully for a moment before she answered.

‘Lambourne, Mrs Gilver, have let me down,’ she said, flicking a glance to me and then fastening her eyes back on Alec again. ‘And I knew you’d still be here, don’t ye know?’ Miss Shanks’s Scotch brogue was intermittent and utterly bogus, but I was beginning to get a handle on its comings and goings: it carried her over chasms where good taste and fine feeling might send her tumbling. ‘I thought, despite our wee misunderstanding yesterday, that I might persuade you to stay, since you’ve trundled all the way up to us here by the sparkling sea, eh?’

‘Down, actually,’ I said. ‘Not that it ma-’

‘And since you’re so settled.’ She twinkled at me. ‘Cooried in, ye might say.’

Alec and I were completely bamboozled.

‘But as you yourself pointed out, Miss Shanks,’ I said, ‘my married state is not at all suitable for employment at your establishment.’ I was beginning to sound like the woman, damn her.

‘Well, I thought about that, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Shanks, attempting a girlish air – mostly made up of swinging her skirts from side to side and looking at me out of the corner of her eye – ‘and talked it over with one of my colleagues, and I decided that if you would submit to being known as Miss Gilver while you’re with us, the girls don’t need to know.’

‘Your colleague Miss Lipscott?’ I could not imagine Fleur clamouring for my return but I could not imagine any of the Misses Lovage, Barclay or Christopher caring one way or the other.

‘Mrs Brown,’ said Miss Shanks. She stuck her chin in the air and carried on very loftily. ‘She’s on the housekeeping staff.’

Alec now went so far as to cross his eyes and stick his tongue out to signal his bewilderment to me. Miss Shanks, facing the way she did, missed it but the widow’s companion caught it and turned back to her boiled egg with a look of distaste at such vulgarity.

‘I see,’ I lied. Miss Shanks giggled, although at least the skirt-swinging had stopped, I was glad to see.

‘I’m sure your husband won’t mind. Since, as you said yourself and as we all can see,’ she jerked her head towards Alec like a farmer at a cattle auction, ‘he is so very understanding.’ She beamed at me. ‘Now you finish up your brekkie and then toddle up to see me, eh? I’ll arrange for Anderson to collect your things.’ She folded herself back into her cloak and beamed again.

‘Cheerie-bye,’ she said. ‘À bientôt. Auf Wiedersehen. Toodle-oo.’

And with that she was gone, leaving the silence ringing behind her.

We stared at one another and then turned as the little maid arrived beside us and bobbed.

‘Beg pardon, madam and sir,’ she said. ‘I tried to stop her. I – em – well, my auntie, you see. With the eggs. Always on a Saturday. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. But I never- and she wasn’t there anyway,’ after which unhelpful communication she bobbed again and scurried away to her kitchens.

‘Well,’ I said. I leaned in close across the marmalade pot and milk jug as Alec had, but the dining room at the Crown was hardly twelve feet square and the six breakfast tables were huddled together in the middle of it, leaving room for monstrous sideboards all around, and Miss Shanks’s performance had gathered the crowd’s attention at last, the maid’s little coda doing nothing to disperse it either. Eight pairs of eyes were watching us now, while eight pairs of ears, I imagined, were twitching with fascination.

Alec shovelled in the last two forkfuls of scrambled egg and tomato, drained his coffee cup and sat back.

‘Care to join me for a stroll around the harbour wall?’ he said. ‘And a chat?’

I dabbed my lips and stood.

‘Excellent suggestion,’ I said and we made a poor show of a casual exit, gathering speed until we were fairly trotting through the narrow passageway, making for the front door.

‘What in the blazes?’ I said as we reeled out into a perfect late spring morning, the sea sparkling, a light breeze just ruffling the air and a few white clouds scudding across the sky. It was nine thirty and the harbour was quiet, the fleet gone for the day, only a handful of old men, their seagoing days long past now, standing around, sucking on their pipes and watching the horizon through narrowed eyes. It would be hours on end before any boats returned, but I supposed they might be watching for passing ships; at least, for the sake of their day’s entertainment, I hoped so.

‘She leapt away in horror last night when she heard you were married,’ Alec said. He had his pipe lit, having come downstairs with it filled in readiness, as usual. ‘But this morning, after finding out somehow – but how? – that you’re here with me, she decides you’ll do?’

‘She and Mrs Brown, the housekeeper,’ I reminded him. ‘And what was the parlour maid on about, for heaven’s sake?’ I took out my cigarette case and turned away from the breeze to light one. The convalescent widow was just descending the steps and she gave an ostentatious and surely ceremonial cough, waving her hand in front of her face as though my little puff of smoke were asphyxiating her.

‘Hardly a surprise,’ she said. ‘To find you smoking on the street like a flapper!’ Alec bristled but it did not trouble me. Grant, who despairs of my tweeds at times and wishes fervently that I would take up life in London where they are unknown, would be delighted to learn that such a word had been used of me.

‘I’ve been coming to the Crown every May for twelve years,’ the widow went on, ‘but I should hesitate to return now.’

‘Righty-ho,’ I said. The morning was beginning to take on a tinge of unreality for me.

‘I’ve never seen such a display,’ she went on.

‘Such a display as two people breakfasting together in a public dining room?’ said Alec. ‘Well, I’m glad we could add to your life’s excitements.’

‘A hotbed of gossip and intrigue,’ said the widow. Her companion had come out after her with a shawl, and was timidly holding it out towards her employer, almost jabbing her with it, as though she hoped the fleecy wool would simply adhere to the woman’s coat shoulders without the one of them taking the trouble of donning the thing or the other finding the nerve to apply it to her person in the usual way.

‘I require new-laid duck eggs,’ she went on.

‘For a digestive condition,’ the companion put in.

‘Aren’t duck eggs richer than ordinar-?’ said Alec.

The widow swept on. ‘And the cook at the school-’

‘Mrs Brown?’ I fell on this very slight particle of sense.

‘Mrs Brown indeed supplies them to her niece who-’

‘Ahhhhh!’ said both Alec and I. Then we frowned, in unison, as though we had been practising.

‘-repays the favour, it appears, with gossip about her patrons, carried right back up the hill and spread around. Stop dabbing me with that shawl, Enid, do! Give it here, can’t you?’

The companion buckled and whimpered as the widow snatched the garment out of her hands and wrapped herself very firmly up in it.

‘I am most grievously disappointed,’ she announced. ‘And now I’m going for my walk, which I certainly need more than ever today.’

‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Alec, looking after her as she sailed away, with the benighted Enid sliding along at her side as invisibly as a rather large young woman in bright rust-red tweeds can ever slide.

‘Another one,’ I agreed. ‘So Miss Shanks finds out from Mrs Brown the housekeeper who found out from her niece at the Crown that Mrs Gilver the assumed French mistress is not just unsuitable but actually scandalous and wicked and…’

‘… she hotfoots it down to engage you,’ said Alec. ‘The plot doesn’t exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It curdles,’ I said. ‘But I tell you one thing, I’m going to do my very best to remember my avoir and être and see if I can’t get myself ensconced up there. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with whatever’s up with Fleur-’

‘Or the four people she has apparently killed…’

‘But there’s something very odd about St Columba’s.’ I turned and gazed up at the long grey facade of the place again. It was not looming this morning, for some reason. If common sense and sanity had not prevented me I would have said it had taken a good step back from the edge of the cliff overnight and was now safely set behind its gardens in an unremarkable way. I saw Alec frowning at it too.

‘Very changeable light round here,’ he said. ‘Must be what draws the painters.’ He shivered faintly.

‘And I take back what I said about your cuckolded fisherman,’ I said. ‘Right now, if I thought you could pass as Miss Osborne, I’d swap cases with you.’

‘Well, come and meet my client to be going along with,’ Alec said. ‘He’s an interesting chap, and not a fisherman, by the way.’

He pointed me on the right course, along under the St Columba’s cliff and out around the natural arm of the harbour until we were opposite the main street and could look back over at the Crown, at the housemaids shaking eiderdowns out of the upstairs windows and the grocer’s shop two doors down. The grocer was unwinding his awning against the sun for the day and the delivery boy was packing his basket with brown parcels, whistling the same snatch of song over and over again, quite tunelessly. Behind the main street, where a few cottage rows clung to the hillside, washing was being pegged out – heavy overalls and school pinafores on this Saturday morning when the working week was done – and in one front garden a stout housewife was scattering scraps to a small flock of chickens. At one of the villas perched on the high road, a matron in a blue coat and a matching hat (with a feather we could see all the way from the far harbour wall) let herself out at her garden gate and turned to walk briskly towards the station, stepping up her pace even more as the whistle sounded to tell of an approaching train.

‘Here we are then,’ Alec said and I turned back to face him, then raised my eyebrows.

‘I wondered what that was,’ I said. ‘I smelled it last night.’

‘I tasted it last night,’ Alec said. ‘And very delicious it was too.’

We were standing in front of a rather commodious brick shack of the kind often found at harboursides; an erstwhile boathouse perhaps, or a lifeboat station abandoned when a grateful village or a wealthy patron stumped up for a grander one. They often see out their lives as storehouses for nets in winter or lowly shelters for lobster pots in the off-season. This particular shack, however, had gone on from its beginnings to bigger and better things. Its walls had been whitewashed and its window frames painted a cheerful shade of green. A pillar-box-red door stood open, allowing us a glimpse of shining cream-coloured linoleum, a high counter made out of glass and more of the green-painted wood. A sign above the door said Aldo’s Fish Bar in red writing, with little flags decorating the corners.

‘You dined off fried fish last night?’ I asked Alec.

‘And fried chips,’ he said.

‘And then two tongue sandwiches and milky coffee at supper time,’ I said. ‘You should have the figure of Henry VIII by rights.’

‘Come in and meet Joe,’ Alec said, and disappeared into the darkened doorway.

I followed, leaving behind the scent of seaweed and yesterday’s catch and stepping into a rich, grease-laden, savoury fog so thick one could feel it settle on one’s skin. It must, I thought to myself looking around, be impregnated into the very walls, for there was no food in evidence, nor was there any sign of its being on its way or traces of it left over from the night before. The glass counter shone like the windows of an excellent housekeeper, as though vinegar and brown paper had only just been applied, and the metal grilles beneath the counter, where one assumed the hot food waited to be sold, glittered like the radiator of a beloved and expensive motorcar.

Alec had disappeared behind the counter, passing the empty frying vessels and disappearing through a door into the back premises.

‘Buongiorno, my friend! Good morning. Good to see you. Avanti! Benvenuto! Come in!’

The voice was as rich and warm as the thick scents that filled the room and must surely have been by far the most exotic sound ever to have boomed out around Portpatrick harbour. Feeling suddenly shy, I peeped around the doorway. On a stool in the middle of a tiny scullery, peeling potatoes into a tub the size of a dustbin clamped between his knees, was a black-haired, cherry-cheeked man, broad-shouldered and thickened with middle age, dressed in a collarless shirt, cambric trousers like a fisherman and a butcher’s striped apron.

‘You sound pretty chipper,’ I heard Alec say to him. ‘Is she back then?’

‘Cheep-ah?’ said Joe. He wiped his face with a forearm as though he had been sweating, even this early on such a fresh spring day; and then, holding his knife like a fairground thrower, he flicked it into the barrel of peeled potatoes. It entered one of them with a whistling sound and a small splash of water.

‘Happy,’ said Alec. ‘You sound happy. Has your wife come home?’

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Joe. ‘Not a sight, not a sound. Niente. I am happy because you are here to help me. Now I have a friend.’ He beamed at Alec, and since the beaming entailed an expansive sweeping glance around the room, at last he spotted me and shot to his feet, wiping his face again and tearing off the blue cotton cook’s cap he had been wearing.

‘Scusi, signorina,’ he said. ‘How I can help you? The cafe she is closed, but how I can help you? Only say. Giuseppe Aldo is your servant.’

‘How do you do?’ I said and then immediately blushed to hear such primness responding to his torrent of chivalry.

‘Mrs Gilver is a friend of mine,’ said Alec. ‘My business partner, actually. Also a detective, don’t you know.’

‘A lady detective…’ said Joe, or Giuseppe as he seemed to be. He sat back down again at his stool, motioning me into one of the three wooden chairs set around the little table in the scullery. Once there he gazed at me, letting out a long low whistle. ‘Okay-dokey, so you breakfass? You hungry? Hah?’

‘I could manage a little something,’ said Alec, ignoring my look. He had eaten a heartier breakfast than someone who had had two dinners might have been expected to, and not a half-hour before.

‘I make you caffé and zeppole,’ said Joe. ‘Mos’ delectable food you ever have in your life before. Coming up!’ He stood and took the two paces needed over to a cooking stove set under the window. There he pulled a heavy, high-sided pot onto the ring and lit the gas with a match. I suspected from the look of the pot’s outside what it contained, and very soon my nostrils told me my guess was accurate. It was a pan of beef dripping slowly warming up for things to fry in.

As to what might be fried, once Joe had changed his striped blue apron for a white one, long enough to reach the top of his boots and wide enough to meet at the back of his considerable girth, he fetched an enormous bowl from the cold larder, washed his fingers in water from a kettle – hot enough to make Alec and me both wince, although Joe just chuckled and shook his reddened hand dry – and started breaking off little pieces from a mound of dough which was mushrooming inside the mixing bowl like a puffball.

All the time he worked he was talking, and soon the strange sing-song of his voice, as odd as it had sounded when first I had heard it, came to seem quite natural so that I would not have said he had any accent at all.

‘She is gone like the setting sun,’ he said. ‘Like the sun she will return, but I cannot deny she is gone. Gone from my arms but not from my heart. I work too hard. I leave her too long and she is lonely. I do not blame the poor child. She is a child to me. Fifteen years since I marry my sweetheart and she is still that sweet girl to me. So, my friend, you will find her and bring her home and I will rejoice and I will never again work so hard and let my sweet love be lonely. Eat, eat, eat, eat!’

For the fat had got hot and into it he had dropped little spoonfuls of his mixture, watching them (as tenderly as any mother watching her children at play) before fishing them out again and laying them down gently on a plate of sugar. He rolled the plate around until the sugar was crusted all over the little puffs of pastry, and then he tipped the first one onto a clean plate for me.

‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ he said. He poured me a tiny cup of evil-looking black coffee from a fat little pot which had been spluttering on another gas ring, then he swept his arm down like a starter at a race meet and said it again. ‘Eat, eat, eat, eat. Buon appetito. Enjoy!’

And despite the fact that I knew it was fried in dripping, and the fact that I had eaten my breakfast along with Alec and that the coffee was strong enough to give me goose pimples, I did eat – and it was the tastiest little pastry I had ever had in my life. Light, warm, sweet, almost salty – just far enough from being salty to make one yearn for another bite to see if the salt was there. I finished it, licked my sugary fingers as delicately as I could, and craned forward to peer at the pan of hot oil.

Joe Aldo burst into a cascade of delighted laughter.

‘That is it!’ he said. ‘That is the secret. The genius in the lamp, and only a true cook can rub it! I make them one little bite too small. Just one tiny little bite too small and no one, no one, no one, no one ever refuses another. Hah!’

Alec wagged his finger at me and laughed along and I managed to muster a sheepish smile too. I sipped another incendiary mouthful of the black tar Joe Aldo called coffee and asked for a second pastry like a good girl, not wanting to spoil his fun.

When there was a pyramid of them on a plate between us and the fat little coffee pot was sitting on the table too, at last Joe moved the shimmering pan of fat back from the gas ring (setting it on the windowsill, I noticed, where it was sure to taint the wash hung on a rope in the tiny back yard). He removed his white apron, put on the striped one again and went back to his potato peeling, flicking the potato off the knife with an expert twist and plunging his hand into the bucket up to his elbow, wetting his rolled shirtsleeve and not noticing.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I am a bad husband, working and working and never a rose, never a song, never a dance in the moonlight for my lovely wife. Not since her birthday, February, have we danced together in an empty room.’ I took in my stride this hint about the home life of the Aldos and its distance and different nature from my own. ‘And someone saw her, her beautiful black hair and her eyes like rubies. Ah! No – sapphires. And her cheeks like peaches in the evening. I can’t tell you in English how beautiful is my wife. If you spoke my language…’ He decided, apparently, to try it anyway and spent the next minute regaling us about the many wondrous charms of his wife in swooping, elated Italian of which we understood nothing except – in my case – the oft-repeated ‘-issima’s, which gave one the distinct impression that he really meant it.

‘And you’re sure it’s someone in the town?’ said Alec when Joe finally stopped talking.

‘She never get letters I don’t see. She never leave the village. It must be someone she met here.’

‘But you don’t know who?’ said Alec. ‘You weren’t able to think of anyone?’

‘Most of the time she see only ladies. Washing, see?’ He pointed out of the window at the waggling rope of laundry. ‘Rosa can wash the lace as fine as web of a spider. She can wash wool as soft as the day the lamb is born.’ I looked askance at the washing outside, just beyond the reach (I hoped) of the oily smoke from Joe’s cooking pan. It looked to be plain yellow cotton shirts and white calico underclothes to me, and I wondered if Rosa’s beauty and prowess in laundry were to be believed. But then, the pastries had been as delicious as their advance press, so perhaps I was being unfair to him.

‘She must see some men,’ said Alec.

‘She see postman, milkman, grocer boy, farmer on top of the hill. He kill a lamb for us and butcher it just how we like it, Rosa and me. I fry fish for my living, bella signora, but my wife Rosa she is the cook. She make a two-day pot of lamb and tomato would raise the dead from their graves. A pollo con funghi could cure a plague.’ He turned back to Alec again. ‘But it could be anyone. Bank manager, fisherman, pub landlord, anyone who ever see her face or hear her voice. I not angry. How he help it, this man, whoever he is? But she has to come home. She will come home. And before Sabbatina even knows she is gone.’

‘Sabbatina?’ I said.

‘It would break her heart. And so also mine. Sabbatina is our daughter. A beautiful child and a genius, una prodigia, a student of the arts and the sciences. Rosa and me so very proud of our girl.’

‘Ah,’ I said, nodding out of the window. I had thought there was a preponderance of yellow amongst the family wash and it was a shade of yellow, very buttery, that had seemed familiar to me. Now I understood: Sabbatina Aldo went to school at the top of the hill.

‘Yes, signora,’ said Joe. ‘Sabbatina is a student at St Columba’s College for the Young Ladies! Can you believe? Hah? Hah? Can you?’

Frankly, I could not. And I was sure that Basil and Candide Rowe-Issing could not possibly know that young Stella was at school with the child of a fish fryer and a washerwoman.

‘A scholarship, I presume?’ I murmured.

‘A scholar of such promise and so very young,’ said her father, perhaps misunderstanding or perhaps unable to resist another chance, however tiny, to brag. I would not know. Poor dear Donald has never given Hugh or me anything to brag about, being dimwitted, gawky, and shy amongst strangers. It is too soon to tell with Teddy, or at least I dearly hope so.

‘But how can you hope to hide the fact that her mother is missing?’ said Alec.

‘She is full scholar, see?’ said Joe. ‘Sleep up there, eat with the girls, that terrible food. Study in her evenings in the common room of the girls. She will visit tomorrow for dinner with her family – cena in famiglia – unless I stop her. Today I will send note to say Rosa is ill, very catching cold, and Sabbatina must stay away.’

‘Giving me a week to find her and persuade her home,’ Alec said.

‘And if you like,’ I offered, ‘I’ll take the note. Sabbatina might know something.’ Joe rumbled a little and I fell over myself to reassure him. ‘I’ll be very subtle, Mr Aldo. I won’t arouse any suspicions.’

‘She love her mother so very very much and I love both of them so very very very-’

‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. I had not heard such sustained protestations of love and affection since my Pereford summer and it was beginning to grate upon my nerves.

Back up at St Columba’s twenty minutes later, I marched right in at the front door like the welcome guest I evidently was (though the reason for my welcome was a continuing mystery to me) and collared a passing twelve-year-old.

‘Where would I find Sabbatina Aldo at this moment, child?’ I said. The little girl encouraged her spectacles back up her nose by means of a most unattractive screwing up of her face and pouting out of her lips before she answered.

‘Who?’

‘Sabbatina,’ I said, slower. Surely there could not be more than one.

‘What form’s she in?’ said the girl. She was sidling away as she spoke, clearly bent on getting to wherever she had been headed when I stopped her.

‘Stand still when I’m addressing you, please,’ I said. ‘I’m Miss Gilver, the new French mistress. Now, take your hands out of your tunic pockets and show me the way to Miss Shanks’s study.’

‘Oh, Miss!’ said the child, instantly woebegone. ‘I’ve got thirty-five minutes of tennis before I have to start horrid Latin with old Plumface and the big girls said last night you were nice. Please?’

‘Don’t say Plumface,’ I said, even though my lips were twitching.

‘Goody Gilver, Eileen Rendall said.’ The little minx was practically batting her eyelids at me now and I am afraid to say that I succumbed to it.

‘Oh, go on then. Point me in the right direction and then run along.’

I had to raise my voice towards the end of it, because at the first hint of relenting she was running already.

‘West stairs,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘First floor. The one with all the chairs!’ And she was gone.

A child after Hugh’s heart, I thought bitterly, turning around on the spot and trying to deduce which way west might lie. I closed my eyes. The sun set over the sea, beyond the far harbour wall, and the school faced the harbour mouth and since it was May and the sun was setting to the north-west, that meant that the west stair was probably… I set off rather uncertainly towards the farthest corner of the building from the carriage entrance and climbed a set of broad oak stairs I found there.

The first floor – the drawing-room floor in the heyday of the house, one supposed – was quite a good bit grander than the labyrinth of corridors upstairs where Fleur had her little bolthole and had suffered less in the metamorphosis from manor house to boarding school than had the ground floor with its noticeboards and clattering canteen of a dining room. Here was a wide corridor with Palladian over-lintels to its doors – or perhaps Palladian-style would be more accurate, Palladian-esque, even Palladian-ish (for it seemed that the architect had been more entranced by ornament than he had been constrained by authenticity), plasterwork niches so highly decorated they were almost grottoes punctuating its walls, and pelmets above its windows encrusted with bosses and curlicues like a barnacled wreck on the bed of the sea.

With that weight of unavoidable decoration, the thin school carpet and drab school curtains did little to reduce the overall splendour and also there was no need for occasional furniture to break up the yawning blankness as one sometimes sees in plainer houses, where the corridors become a slalom of tables, long-case clocks and even suits of armour. Here it was easy to tell that I had arrived at Miss Shanks’s room, from – as the tennis-bound child had shouted to me – all the chairs. A row of mismatched dining chairs stood along the wall on either side of her door, awaiting, one would surmise, the bottoms of miscreants sent to be dealt with and left simmering so that the prospect of punishment delayed might be half the punishment all on its own.

I knocked. Miss Shanks’s welcome came as a burst of song.

‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to see ye!’

I opened the door and entered, trying hard not to let my eyebrows rise.

‘How’s yersel’, ye’re looking grand!’ she carolled on.

‘Hello again,’ I said.

‘Harry Lauder,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘A wonderful entertainer. I have some gramophone records and I play them for the girls for a treat sometimes.’

‘How delightful,’ I said with a tight smile, thinking how odd her mood was for the current state of her school. One would not have been surprised to find her wringing her hands and tearing at her hair. Skittish hilarity seemed to me to have no place here.

‘And how delightful to have you safely with us after our wee misunderstanding,’ Miss Shanks said. She pointed me into a chair – a miscreant’s chair, clearly, being rather low and set alone before her desk, facing the window. It was a busy, rather messy room: more of the interminable patchwork abandoned on top of a cocktail cabinet and books lying open and face-down on the arms of chairs. There was even a fox’s head, stuffed and mounted, which was serving as a coat hook, scarves and satchels slung over it with abandon. I brought my gaze back to Miss Shanks who was watching me with a small smile curling at her lips.

‘I have no formal qualifications,’ I began.

‘Pouf!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘You speak French, don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘And read it and write it and are familiar with the classics?’ I stopped nodding halfway through this but she did not notice. She sailed on. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll do very nicely. My dear departed Miss Fielding was a great one for certificates and methods and all that, don’t ye know…’

‘Ah, yes, the Froebel method,’ I said. ‘The girls mentioned it to me.’

‘But I have faith in my mistresses no matter what their path to St Columba’s. Once they are here, now that you are here, my dear Miss Gilver, all is sure to be well.’

I nodded even less certainly. Faith in her mistresses? Four of them had deserted her and one had died; her school was surely teetering on the very brink of disaster. And she knew not the first thing about me.

‘Our sixth formers are four weeks from their Higher Cert exams,’ she was saying. I redoubled my efforts at concentration. ‘They must be your particular concern, naturally.’

‘That kind of certificate does interest you then?’ I said. Miss Shanks opened her eyes very wide.

‘Och, but of course,’ she said. ‘Of course, of course. Five of our sixth form are bound for university, Miss Gilver. Five! Out of only twenty. And three of the others could have gone if they’d a mind to. Two off to Edinburgh, one straight to St Andrews, one to St Andrews after a year in Switzerland and one, can you guess?’

‘Oxford?’ I said.

‘Somerville College, Oxford,’ said Miss Shanks in tones of wonder. ‘If my dear Fielding is looking down on us she will be tickled pink.’

‘And are any of them going up to read French?’ I said, resisting with some effort the impulse to cross my fingers for luck.

‘One,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I forget which one, but one certainly. French, two for history, one for chemistry if you can believe it and one… oh, geography I think. Not that it matters.’

‘I see,’ I said. I was furiously trying to remember what I had ever known of Donald and Teddy’s French at Eton, furiously trying to convince myself either that I could coach one clever girl through the last few weeks – she was surely more or less running under her own steam now? – or that I could fulfil my obligations to Pearl and Aurora in a hundred other ways besides passing myself off as a mistress in this school.

‘Well, I suppose I’ve got until Monday morning to prepare, have I?’ I said.

‘Yes, I’ll show you to Mademoiselle Beauclerc’s room and you can acquaint yourself with her lessons. It makes sense for you just to take over her room, I suppose, although it’s one of the nicest ones and with you being new, strictly speaking, it should be “all roll over and one fall out”, don’t ye know.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘One fell out and so we all roll over and the new girl comes in at the far end. Just my bit of fun, Miss Gilver. I daresay no one will make a fuss for the last few weeks of term and then we can all bags new rooms in September.’

I managed a smile, but my head was reeling. I had fraternised in the course of my detecting career with circus performers and music-hall turns, cottagers and publicans, opium fiends and charlatans and once – frankly – witches, but I had never met anyone whose conversation left me feeling as rudderless as little Miss Shanks. No one even came close to her.

‘Right then,’ I said, and stood.

‘We’ll soon have her things cleared out of your way and everything shipshape.’

‘She…’ I swallowed. ‘She didn’t take her things?’

‘Not all of them,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Not many, actually. She left in a bit of a rush. But one of the maids will soon get her study and bedroom ready for you. Or one of the girls maybe.’

‘Oh!’ I said, sitting again. ‘I was forgetting. I have a message for one of the girls. Sabbatina Aldo?’ Miss Shanks’s face turned blank and she shook her head.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Sabbatina? From the village. Her father asked me to say that her mother is unwell – a contagious cold – she is not to visit tomorrow as is usual.’

‘Ah!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Betty. We call her Betty Alder, Miss Gilver. Much more suitable. I’ll make sure she gets the message.’

‘I look forward to meeting her,’ I said. ‘I take it she studies French, doesn’t she?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I don’t know the child.’

‘Oh?’ This was odd for two reasons: in a school of one hundred girls one would expect the headmistress to know all of them and, besides, Sabbatina Aldo was hardly run of the mill. ‘Isn’t she a scholarship girl?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Miss Shanks. Her voice was cold and the brogue was quite gone.

‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I got the impression that she was a tremendously bright pupil. Perhaps I imagined the scholarship angle all on my own.’ I was sure I had not, but there seemed nothing else to say.

‘She is,’ said Miss Shanks, ‘extremely clever and bookish. And here thanks to a wealthy patron. She is of absolutely no interest to me.’

Which, coming out of the mouth of the headmistress of a school which went in for sending its girls to college, was a mystifying remark even set against Miss Shanks’s inexhaustible supply of them. I stared at the woman; quite honestly I gawped at her but, before I could think of a reply, a knock came at the door.

‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to-’ Miss Shanks did not get to the end of her little ditty. The door opened and Fleur Lipscott blundered into the room.

‘Miss Shanks,’ she said. She put both of her hands on the back of my chair and leaned her weight on it. I would not have risked a wager that she even noticed I was sitting there. ‘There are policemen downstairs.’

Miss Shanks said nothing but she sat up very straight and drew in a sharp breath.

‘They were asking Tessie to take them to you but I happened to be passing the door. They’ve found a body. Washed up out of the sea. At Dunskey. A female body.’

Miss Shanks and I had both scrambled to our feet and Fleur noticed me for the first time.

‘What brought them here?’ said Miss Shanks. Her voice was high and tremulous. ‘Oh my good Lord, it’s not one of the girls, is it? Was anyone missing at breakfast time?’

‘It’s a woman,’ Fleur said. ‘Not a girl. They came here because they thought it might be one of us. One of the mistresses. From the way she was dressed, I suppose.’

‘How long-’ Miss Shanks had to clear her throat and start again. ‘How long has it been in the water, did they say? Which one did they think it might be?’

The room swirled just a little around me then and I put my hand out to steady myself, finding Fleur’s icy fingers under my own. She flinched and then grabbed my wrist.

‘Dandy,’ she said. ‘They – the policemen – want someone to go and look at it – her. I’ll go but only if you come with me.’

Miss Shanks pattered around the side of her desk and came to stand, shifting from foot to foot, between us.

‘It should be me,’ she said, but plaintively with not a shred of determination. ‘As headmistress it falls to me. Oh, how I wish Miss Fielding were here! Perhaps Mrs Brown would… I can’t!’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. The sight and the smell of it. I’ll faint or be sick. I feel ill just thinking about it. How long did they say?’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Fleur. ‘Mrs Gilver will come with me.’

It seemed that I was not to have a say and I was feeling rather green myself at the prospect, especially since Miss Shanks had brought the rude facts of the matter right out into the open that way.

‘I shan’t forget this, Miss Lipscott,’ said the headmistress. ‘I shall never forget that you did this for me.’

Fleur gave her a long cool look which I could not decipher before she turned back to me.

‘Dandy? No time like the present. The policemen have a motorcar with them. They can take us there right away.’

There turned out to be a small cove a mile or two north of Portpatrick. Four of us – Fleur, me, a sergeant and a constable – trundled up out of the village on the road I had taken from the station the evening before and onto a little farm lane before turning to the sea again and following an even smaller lane down through the woods to a headland. The constable pulled off onto a patch of ash beside a cottage and stopped the engine.

‘This is as far as the road goes,’ he said. ‘There’s a wee path’ll take us down from here.’

‘Where is she?’ I asked, horrified to think, no matter how long the body had been in the water, that they had simply hauled her up the beach, covered her with a tarpaulin and left her there.

‘Dinnae worry, miss,’ he replied. ‘She’s inside, decent as decent can be.’

The cottage wife looked with wary interest out of her kitchen window at us all alighting from the motorcar, and a clutch of her children peeped around the side of the house wall, going so far as to follow behind us as we set off two by two towards the track we were to take to the shoreline.

‘Scat!’ said the constable, turning round and stamping his foot at them. ‘Gah!’ The children scattered, giggling. ‘They’d no’ be laughin’ if we let them come with us and they saw her,’ he said. ‘Or smell-’

‘Tsst!’ said the sergeant and his man fell silent, but not soon enough for me. The succession of sugary little pastries and the two cups of coffee-flavoured tar were lurching around inside me. I stole a look over at Fleur but nothing could be gleaned from her pale, set face and her timid posture. She had looked terrified since the first moment I had laid eyes upon her, last night in the staffroom.

The path was not long and within minutes we had come out onto a pebbly cove between rocks, where there was a curious little wooden building like two hexagonal beach huts stuck together, their pointed roofs and arched windows looking straight out of a fairy tale.

‘What is that?’ I said, thinking that if it were my little summerhouse I would not have been best pleased to have had the police commandeer it to lay out a body, new-plucked from its fishy grave.

‘Cable station,’ said the constable. ‘It was built to house the machinery for the telegraph cable. Quite interest-’

‘Tsst,’ said the sergeant again. He had taken off his cap and nodded at the constable to do the same. Then he drew a deep breath and turned to Fleur and me.

‘If you’ve a handkerchief, ladies,’ he said, ‘you might want to…’ He demonstrated with his own large cotton square, clamping it hard over his nose and mouth. I fished my little bit of lace out from my pocket and did the same. Fleur shook her head slightly. The sergeant opened the door and we stepped inside.

On a table against the far side of the room – only seven or eight feet away at that – a humped shape under a sheet lay as still as a stone. I concentrated hard on breathing through my mouth, after hearing a soft groan from Fleur.

I had seen corpses before now. I had watched men become corpses once or twice in the convalescent home during the war, where convalescing was predominant but not guaranteed. And in latter years I had been forced to look at and sometimes touch no fewer than seven dead people, some of them dead by the most violent means that wickedness could bring. But all of these corpses had been newly departed this life, a few hours gone at most since they had been breathing. What awaited me under the sheeting in the cable station that bright May morning was something else again.

The sergeant took another of his enormous breaths and swept back the cover from the remains it had been shrouding.

Fleur let out a shuddering kind of moan and put her hand up to her mouth at last. I stared straight ahead out of the window, attempting to bring my panicky breaths back to something near normal before I tried to look at the thing.

‘Well?’ said the sergeant. I glanced at him. He was talking to Fleur, but as he looked from her face down at the table my eyes, without my bidding, followed his gaze.

‘Oh God,’ I said and then the most surprising thing happened. I was not sickened nor frightened by what was lying there. Instead, I felt a tear bulge up in each of my staring eyes and drop down my cheeks.

Her hair was matted and stiff with salt, straggling over one shoulder and lying in a clump on her breast. Her clothes were dark with the water and twisted around her body from where she had been roughly humped onto the table. Her shoes were gone, her stockings tattered and her feet, puffed up like monstrous toadstools, were mottled with wounds and sores. Her hands were half-hidden in her clothes, but I could see that they looked just like her feet, swollen and nibbled. Terrible to think they had put on those clothes and brushed that sodden hair.

I wiped the tears away from my eyes and looked at her face, or at the dreadful, pitiable sight where her face should be. And finally I felt the floor begin to tilt.

‘Steady there,’ said the constable and put his good strong arm across my back. The sergeant was already holding Fleur by her elbows and I could tell from the grim look upon his face that she was buckling.

‘Is that one of your colleagues, miss?’ he asked her. She shook her head and the movement seemed to strengthen her. The sergeant took his hands away.

‘Do you know who it is?’ said the constable gently. Fleur took a step forward and bent over the body, looking at the buttons on the high-necked dress, staring at the lace around the collar. I could not have put my face so close to that grey skin with the ragged edge where her face should have begun if all our lives had depended upon me.

‘Miss?’ said the constable.

‘It’s not Jeanne Beauclerc,’ said Fleur.

The constable swallowed audibly.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘I – I don’t know her,’ said Fleur.

‘Madam?’ said the sergeant, looking back at me.

‘Nor I.’ My voice sounded thin and high, like a child’s.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s that then.’ He must have been struggling, poor man, because he turned very sharply and almost ran out of the little room back to the open air.

‘You can go now,’ said the constable. He was staring at Fleur, with his face twisted up, staring at the way she was crouched over the body, six inches away from the soaking cloth and the flesh. He was horrified and I was not far behind him.

‘Fleur,’ I said. ‘Darling, let’s go.’

She spoke, just one muttered word, and then straightened and turned away.

‘What was that, miss?’ the constable said. ‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Fleur, and walked out onto the beach. But she had not said nothing. I did not repeat it, but I had heard it.

She had said, ‘Five.’