Bothersome Number of Corpses

5

‘Yep,’ said Constable Reid, slamming shut the wardrobe door which gave an echoing boom. ‘She’s away.’

‘I can furnish you with the address of her family home and those of her sisters and…’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Reid, but his tone was not one of huffy offence any more. He stood looking out of the window, tapping a tune with one finger on the hollow of his cheek. ‘Only… how come she got packed up and off so quickly?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, slowly, thinking of the bareness of her room the night before and the way she had yelped when I mentioned the possibility, ‘maybe she was planning to go anyway.’

‘Seein’ as how she’d killed somebody?’ he asked. Then he frowned. I frowned.

‘Why would she wait until the body had washed up?’ I said. ‘To see it?’

‘She had a good enough look at it, right enough,’ Reid said. ‘And there’s something no’ right about what she said. It’s like…’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It was too…’

‘Aye,’ said Reid, staring at me like a cow looking over a fence at another cow staring back. Where, I asked myself, was Alec, when one needed him?

‘Also,’ I went on, ‘why would she pretend it wasn’t Mademoiselle Beauclerc? She’d be so easily caught out.’

‘If it is that French one,’ said Reid. ‘We’ll need to get another one of them up there and see, eh?’

We had left the door open behind us when we entered and now heard footsteps approaching along the passageway; a very steady tread which already I recognised as belonging to the sturdy little booted feet of Miss Shanks. I braced myself for the encounter as she hove into the doorway and stopped there.

‘Aha!’ she said. ‘Miss Gilver and… escort. Thank you, young man, for bringing my bonnie back home. Most thoughtful. And I take it the poor unfortunate was no one we know? Since I haven’t heard otherwise? Splendid, splendid, jolly good.’ Reid tried to break into the stream but was unsuccessful and retired into silence.

‘So, my dear Miss Gilver,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘I thought I’d find you in Miss Lipscott’s rooms. Where is she, by the way? Sad news, I’m afraid. Look who’s here!’ She drew to her side a middle-aged woman dressed in a gunmetal-grey travelling costume whom I had never set eyes upon before in my life.

‘Such a shame,’ she said, ‘I had very high hopes of you, my dear. But Miss Glennie comes with the Lambourne Agency’s highest recommendation and, besides, she has been a governess to- Well, let’s not tell tales in school, eh?’ She broke off to utter a series of whinnying high-pitched giggles with her hand in front of her mouth.

‘How do you do, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘Welcome to St Columba’s.’ She nodded slightly. ‘Might I though, Miss Shanks, before I go, have a quiet word?’ I shrank from speaking freely in front of the new mistress of the faceless, handless corpse who might well be the old one.

‘Why certainly, for sure, for sure,’ sang out Miss Shanks. I did not recognise her words as a quotation, but her habit of speech was beginning to make everything she said sound like a snatch of some music-hall ditty, or like the last line of prose in a light operetta just before the band strikes up and the cast bursts into out-and-out song. ‘You’ll find your way back to my sitting room all right, won’t you, Miss Glennie?’ she said, to the new mistress’s astonishment. Miss Glennie blinked and gave half a look over her shoulder at the turn in the passageway.

‘Perhaps one of the girls…?’ I said, gesturing to the doors on either side. Miss Shanks gave them a swift glance and then shook her head.

‘Just keep turning left, Miss Glennie,’ she said, ‘and you’ll come soon enough to the top of the stairs. It works for mazes too if you’re ever lost in one. I’ll not be a tick.’ She went so far as to give the woman a little shove in the small of her back as she set off, and then she came inside and held the door open like a commissionaire, twinkling at Constable Reid.

‘Thank you again, laddie,’ she said, ‘and give my kind regards to the inspector when you see him.’ She turned to me. ‘Inspector Douglass’s girl comes here, you know. A very promising scholar.’

‘I’m stayin’,’ said Reid, and something in his tone caused Miss Shanks to turn abruptly and shut the door.

‘Don’t tell me!’ she said. ‘It was never? Was it? Wee Mademoiselle?’

‘We don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Miss Lipscott said not.’

‘Well then!’ said Miss Shanks.

‘She was very upset, though, and might have been mistaken.’

‘She’s a steady sort as a rule,’ said the headmistress.

‘Steady!’ said Reid. ‘She’s hooked it.’

‘She’s what?’

‘She’s gone, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘And one has to wonder – that is, the police have to consider – I mean to say. A body turns up, dead by some misadventure, and someone runs away. One has to ask oneself whether one is connected to the other. It would be best to have a second witness try to identify the body, don’t you see?’

‘You mean…’ said Miss Shanks, ‘that Miss Lipscott feared… she might be next?’ This sudden suggestion startled both Reid and me and we opened our mouths to protest. ‘Or even worse! Oh, surely not! You don’t mean you thought Miss Lipscott…? You do! I can tell from your faces!’

‘Were they enemies?’ said Reid. ‘Had they fell out?’

‘Certainly not!’ cried Miss Shanks. ‘They were great friends. If Miss Lipscott said the corpse was a stranger then why not leave it at that? If Miss Lipscott chose to go – most inconvenient but there’s no need to make a penny dreadful out of… I say! Every cloud, Miss Gilver! How d’ye fancy English instead of French and you don’t have to leave us after all?’

‘Miss Shanks,’ said Constable Reid, barely containing himself. ‘I’m no’ just so sure you appreciate what we’re sayin’. Miss Lipscott has run away. Look.’ He opened the door of the wardrobe upon the pitiful sight of a half a dozen empty coat hangers, padded and covered with cloth, a lavender bag drooping sadly from each.

‘I worked those covers, you know,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘They’re just a nice wee size of job for teatime in the staffroom.’

‘And I’m going to have to ask another of youse to come and say aye or no once and for all about this poor soul we’ve got lying up there.’

‘Miss Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks at once. ‘She has the constitution of an ox. She’d have had a better time of it than poor Miss Christopher with all those nasty dissections. After the science mistress left us, you know.’

‘I wonder you didn’t think of her this morning, then,’ I said. ‘And save poor Miss Lipscott a sight that might well have caused to her to pack her bags and flee.’

‘Oh no,’ said Miss Shanks, turning round and causing us almost to collide with her – we had begun our journey to Miss Barclay’s rooms already. ‘It wasn’t the shock of the corpse, Miss Gilver. And it wasn’t fear for her own skin. Nor that other thing either – what an idea! No, this has been on the cards for a whiley. Quite a wee whiley, aye.’ She beamed at us, turned to face front again and tramped off. Reid lifted one finger and twirled it around by his temple. I nodded. Either that or drink, I was thinking, though her progress up the passageway was as straight as a plumb line.

Miss Barclay gave us a look of pure terror as we entered her room. At least, for a moment I thought so. She was hunched over her desk, a towering pile of test-papers at one elbow and a sliding heap of open textbooks at the other, and she looked up like a rabbit who has seen the shadow of an eagle passing over. She dropped her pen into the inkwell with a little splash and took the red pencil out from behind her ear.

‘Headmistress?’ she said.

‘So sorry, Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘But don’t look like that, my dearie! I’m not going to bite. You’ll be giving Miss Gilver here the wrong impression of our happy band, so you will. Now, I’ll make the cocoa myself for your return – or chicken broth, if you’ve a mind that way – but I need to ask you to go with this laddie here and look at that body they’ve fished up out of the sea.’

‘You said at lunch Miss Lipscott had done it,’ said Miss Barclay. She stood up and walked away from her desk.

‘She did,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Then she packed up her troubles in her old kit bag! Leaving our boys in blue not very happy to take her say-so on who the corpse might be.’

‘Gone?’ said Miss Barclay. Her expression, back to the light coming in the window behind her, was unreadable and I started edging round the wall hoping for a better view.

‘But Lambourne have sent us Miss Glennie, like manna from heaven. Miss Thomasina Glennie who used to be an under-governess at Balmoral when-’ Miss Shanks then clamped her hand to her mouth and gave that high-pitched giggle again. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say,’ she said. ‘And so she’s the new French mistress.’

‘Balmoral, eh?’ said Miss Barclay, with shrewdly narrowed eyes. Mine, I suspected, were as round as plates. How could anyone swallow a story like that? Even someone as odd as Miss Shanks had to see it for the trumped-up nonsense it must be.

‘And so Miss Gilver here is the new English mistress.’

‘Um,’ said the new English mistress.

‘Miss Gilver?’ said Miss Barclay.

‘Grammar?’ I said. ‘Or novels and what have you?’ But truth be told, I would gladly have parsed all one hundred stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight if it meant I could stay put and take a crack at this oddest of cases. (I had been exposed to the thing by a tutor of my brother’s, introduced into the household by my father but shortly expelled from it again when Nanny Palmer saw what he had us reading.)

‘All roll over and one fall out!’ said Miss Shanks, as she had before.

‘You know best, Headmistress,’ said Miss Barclay. She fished her pen back out of the inkwell, wiped it and capped it. Then she stood and followed Constable Reid out of the room.

‘A bit of spelling, a spot of composition,’ said Miss Shanks, once we were alone. She had gone to the window and was gazing down into the grounds. ‘As long as they’ve read some Scott and some Shakespeare their mummies and daddies are happy. Clear lungs and rosy cheeks, that’s the main thing. Just look at them, would you?’

I joined her at the window, which was on the west front and gave a view I had not seen before now: a view of grassy headland with the blue-green sea sparkling in the middle distance and, sparkling in the immediate foreground, a bathing pool of impressive proportions in that shade of turquoise unknown to any sailor of the world’s oceans but apparently very dear to every maker of ceramic tiles. Around the pool were more of the draped and drowsing girls, none of them actually swimming. Those in the water seemed to be floating on rafts, while at the edges girls were stretched out in deckchairs, not quite naked, but close enough so that I felt stupid remembering what I had said to the others regarding hats.

‘Won’t they get cold?’ I said. It was sunny, but it was Scotland.

‘The water’s heated,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Such a treat to dip into warm water for a wee splash about.’ I nodded, secretly scandalised by the idea of such luxury. Besides, there was no splashing down there, barely a ripple as the little rafts eddied around. ‘Still,’ Miss Shanks said, ‘it’s early in the season and we don’t want them sniffling for Parents’ Day. Just you slip down, Miss Gilver, and tell them to get in to the kitchen for cocoa and I’ll just slip down and ask our good Mrs Brown to put the milk on.’

Now this was going far beyond the heating of a little bathing water. Every nanny and every girl and boy who had been brought up by one knew that there was only one thing to do when one was cold from languid bathing: one ran up and down until one was warm again. Then one went back to the water until one was blue and shivering, then more running, and so on and so on until teatime. In fact, it was my considered opinion that the wonderful night’s sleep which followed a day at the seaside was nothing to do with fresh air at all but owed itself to athletics alone.

‘And shall we try to find out where Miss Lipscott has gone?’ I said.

‘Oh, I think Miss Lipscott has made it clear she’s done with us, don’t you?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I had high hopes of her once but she never did shape to the job and this bolt has been a long time coming.’

‘But still-’ I said.

‘If the police want to find her then they can do the searching,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers.’

‘Well, shall we at least ring her sisters and let them know? Shall I? Since I’m acquainted with them?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Now, go and tell those girls to put on their wraps and come inside.’

I took this to give me carte blanche to do what I chose in the matter of Fleur. And what I chose to do was find her. (Of course, I should also have to spend some little time on the question of why Miss Shanks left it to me, of why she had been so frantic about the mademoiselle and cared not a fig for Miss Lipscott. It was Betty Alder all over again.)

So it was with a great many questions bumping around inside my mind that I let myself out of the front door of the house and made my way around to the bathing pool. It really was getting rather chilly, even though the northern sun was still high in the sky, and my task was being taken out of my hands as the girls themselves variously sat up, stood and tried to rub the goose pimples from their bare arms. In the pool the bathers were slipping off the rafts, out of the cool air and into the warm water.

‘Jolly good,’ I called to them. ‘Hurry up and get dry and there’s cocoa in the kitchens for you.’

Then there came again the rustle of whispers – ‘Who’s that?’, ‘Miss Gilver’, ‘French mistress’ – as they folded their deckchairs and leaned them together like playing cards (in Scotland, even on an afternoon where the sky is clear to the far horizon, one is always preparing for rain).

It was a very pleasant scene, the mild sunshine and the girls in their colourful bathing suits; even the pool itself was not so monstrous viewed from down here. The steps and rails were of painted wood and not the nasty chromium of a common lido and the turquoise-blue tiles stopped at the water’s edge; the lounging terrace around it was good grey granite and weathering nicely. I stepped over to read the inscription carved into an especially large granite slab. The Rowe-Issing Bathing Pool, it read. By the kindness of Cmdr and Mrs B. T. H. Rowe-Issing. Opened 21st June 1925.

I stared until my watering eyes reminded me to blink. It was unthinkable that Basil and Candide Rowe-Issing had given Miss Shanks’s funny little school a bathing pool. For one thing, they had no money these days. For another, what bent pennies they ever did find down the backs of sofas were spent on their son, as could only be expected. And finally, even had they no son and had they pots of money as before, a garish blue bathing pool with their names etched in black on a granite slab by the deep end… nothing would have possessed them. I could picture Candide’s little shudder and the pursed little moue of her mouth at anything half so vulgar.

It was hardly less unthinkable, though, that there could be two Commander B.T.H. Rowe-Issings and that one would donate a pool to the school where the other’s daughter happened to be boarding.

Such a puzzle, and such a delicious morsel too. Not that I was a gossip; at least, I had not been until I took up detective work, but of late I had begun to wonder. Perhaps the very habit of sleuthing was working on some neglected part of me, like eurhythmics for posture, causing it to grow brawny from frequent use. Perhaps, on the other hand, the question of the Rowe-Issing bathing pool would have piqued the interest of a swami sitting cross-legged in a tree. In either case, for the first time that day I did not wish that Alec was there to listen and enlighten. For the first time in my professional life, I think, I simply longed for Hugh.

The longing passed and when Alec arrived at my side I was as happy as ever to see him, bursting with news and questions after a frankly rather lonely early evening. Saturday supper at St Columba’s was a kind of picnic cum buffet, it appeared; the kitchen staff loading up the long refectory tables with boiled eggs, cold ham and salad and the girls drifting in to fill their plates, pour themselves lemonade from the tall jugs set on the sideboards and drift out again. One could hear them giggling and yelling inside all the dorms and studies as one passed. Indeed, going by one particularly raucous gathering I felt the spirit of Nanny Palmer move within me and I opened the door after one sharp rap.

Five small girls in pyjamas, their mouths full and their eyes wide, turned to stare at me.

‘Simmer down a little, please,’ I said in my best attempt at clipped exasperation.

‘What…?’

‘Who…?’

‘It’s Saturday night!’ This was from a child eating her supper sprawled on her bed like a Roman at a Bacchanalia, except that such a Roman would not be absorbing a wedge of bacon and egg pie.

‘You’ll get a sore tummy if you eat lying down like that,’ I said to her. ‘Not to mention the crumbs.’

‘But it’s Saturday night!’ she said again.

‘Well, be sure to put on your dressing gowns and slippers before you take your plates back down,’ I said. ‘It’s getting chilly in the passageways.’ For the sight of their bare feet, little toes either red or white with cold, was bothering me and they were at the age where frequent spurts of growth ensured that there were stretches of bare leg at the bottoms of their pyjamas and draughty little gaps between jackets and trousers too.

‘Oh, we don’t take them down, Miss Gilver,’ said another. She was sitting on a dressing-table top with her plate of ham and salad resting in amongst the hairbrushes in a most unsavoury way. ‘We just stick them outside for the maids in the morning.’

‘You…?’ I was rendered quite speechless with disapproval, and did not know whence the worst of the shock hit me. Such indolence in the young, such sloppy housekeeping and such inconsideration towards one’s maids were neck, neck and neck. I left them to it and ignored the surge of giggles which followed upon my closing the door.

I might even have dipped a careful toe into the subject with my fellow mistresses but when I edged open the staff room door, holding my own supper plate, it was to find the room empty and the fire cold. When I happened to pass Miss Christopher’s rooms on my way to Fleur’s (which were now to be mine) I saw a light under the door and, listening a little, heard the scrape of a pen and the crunch of an apple being eaten. The maths and science mistress was hard at work. Saturday evening, evidently, was a jamboree for the girls and another night in the salt mines for everyone else; maids and mistresses, anyway.

So when the knock came at my own door a short while later I was glad at the prospect of company.

‘Come in,’ I said.

It was Mrs Brown, and I was pleased to see her.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Good, I was wondering… Might I trouble you to have my things sent up from the Crown, Mrs Brown? I know you’re in frequent contact with your niece. Perhaps you would ring down to her? And then I wonder too if I might ask for the bed to made up in here? And perhaps an armchair or two? Unless the English mistress has a study elsewhere?’

She was nodding.

‘Surely, surely,’ she said. ‘Of course, but I’m here, Miss Gilver, to bring you a visitor.’ And with that she stepped back and let Alec fill the doorway. He paused on the threshold and Mrs Brown, from behind him, spoke again.

‘I’ll get your bags and get one of my girls to bring your sheets so’s you can get your bed made, Miss.’ And with that she was gone.

‘Good evening, Miss Gilver,’ Alec said, still standing neither in nor out of the room.

‘I can’t believe you asked to be brought to my rooms!’ I said.

‘I didn’t!’ Alec replied. ‘I asked if you could be fetched and that doughty woman said “Oh, away and come on with you” and delivered me. I must say, Dan, I thought a girls’ school would be a bit more circumspect.’ He looked around with some interest. ‘And a bit frillier too.’

‘Oh Lord, I suppose you’d be better inside than standing there,’ I said, grabbing him. ‘But keep your voice down and don’t light that accursed pipe.’

When we were arranged, Alec on the hard chair and I on the end of the bed – sitting much more primly than the little girls at their picnic – we shared the fruits of our afternoons. Alec went first, unusually (he prefers to be the finale).

‘Glasgow,’ he said. ‘That’s where Rosa called Joe from. We’ll have a hard job finding her in that teeming anthill of a place.’

‘Did she call from a kiosk?’ I said. ‘If it’s near where she’s staying…’

‘At the Central Station,’ said Alec.

‘Ah.’

‘Quite. There must be dozens of kiosks there. And hundreds of strangers every day and no chance of anyone remembering one of them. Even a black-haired Italian one.’

‘Well, actually, darling, there are quite a lot of black-haired Italians in Glasgow. That’s a thought – does she have relations?’

‘I asked Joe and he said not.’ Alec took his pipe out of his pocket and looked at it sorrowfully.

‘Well, missing persons are the usual bread and butter of a detective agency, or so one is led to believe,’ I said. ‘You could look on it as a belated apprenticeship.’

‘Hm,’ said Alec.

‘Or you could retire gracefully from your case and help me with mine,’ I said. ‘Lord knows I could do with it.’ He looked up at this. ‘Fleur has gone,’ I told him. ‘Packed her traps and slung her hook. This is her room, as it happens, so you can see she meant it.’

‘How many is that?’ said Alec. ‘Six?’

‘The balance shifted a little the other way,’ I said. ‘A Miss Glennie turned up to teach French. But yes: Fleur was the sixth departure including Miss Fielding’s death.’

‘And how is Miss Shanks taking it?’

‘She doesn’t seem all that troubled,’ I told him. ‘That’s the puzzling thing! There’s something very odd about this place, Alec.’ He spread his arms and gestured around him. ‘Well, yes, it’s most peculiar that the housekeeper showed a gentleman up to my chamber, but there’s more.’

‘And what about the police?’ Alec asked. ‘Are they closing the ports and combing the land till they find her?’

‘Miss Barclay has gone to the cable station with PC Reid,’ I said. ‘In fact, she must be long back by now. If she says the body is Miss Beauclerc, then I suppose they’ll have to go after Fleur with bloodhounds.’

‘Leaving aside the other four murders,’ said Alec.

‘I suppose that too,’ I said and then I cocked my head. ‘Someone’s coming.’ Indeed someone was, and I knew who, flitting along the corridor at a tremendous rate. There was a squeak of shoe leather right outside my room and the door burst open.

Miss Shanks swept the room with her gaze and then let go a huge held breath.

‘Good evening, Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘Mr Osborne.’

We waited, both Alec and I, for the expected tirade on the subject of his presence in my bedroom, but nothing came.

‘Miss Shanks,’ I said at last, ‘has Miss Barclay returned?’

‘Oh, she has, she has, she certainly has,’ said Miss Shanks, still standing there, with her hand on the doorknob and breathing heavily after her sprint along the corridor.

‘And?’ I said.

‘It wasn’t our mam’zelle,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘A complete stranger. Nothing to do with St Columba’s at all, whoever she was, the poor soul.’

‘Well then,’ said Alec. ‘Not that one would wish drowning on a stranger, but good to know it wasn’t a mistress. Or a parent.’

‘A parent?’ said Miss Shanks, her voice rising to a shriek.

‘There was a suspicion it might be Sabbatina’s mother,’ I said.

‘Betty Alder?’

‘Quite,’ I continued. ‘But it’s not.’

‘Why on earth would Betty Alder’s mother want to kill herself?’ said Miss Shanks, in that same dismissive way which had puzzled me earlier in the day. ‘Right then,’ she went on. ‘I’ll leave you two to it. Goodnight, Mr Osborne. Chapel at nine, Miss Gilver. Breakfast at eight. Long lie on a Sunday.’ She gave the room another searching look and then was gone.

‘She is the oddest creature I have ever encountered,’ I said, when her footsteps had pattered away and there was silence again.

‘What was she looking for? She quite obviously didn’t come to tell you the news of the body.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘The body. The mysterious body.’

‘You’re right, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You need my help. So where do we begin?’

In response, I stood and wrestled open the sash window.

‘I can’t even begin to begin without a cigarette,’ I said. ‘And you may as well light that filthy thing, Alec, since the powers that be know you’re here anyway.’

‘Gladly,’ Alec said and busied himself with the considerable paraphernalia.

‘So,’ I said, once calmed by a good few lungfuls of delicious Turkish smoke. ‘As I see it, we have three separate problems. We need to find these mistresses – and actually, since I’m employed by the Lipscotts, finding Fleur is the only bit of the whole case that’s really my business.’

‘When did that ever matter to you?’ Alec said. ‘Agreed, though. Number one. Find mistresses.’

‘Number two – possibly related and possibly not – solve five murders. Or at least find out if they really happened.’

‘The fifth corpse is real enough.’

‘And three – again possibly related and possibly not – identify the all-too-real corpse.’

‘I can’t see us chasing off to Glasgow after a missing wife, then,’ said Alec.

‘There might be some chasing off, though,’ I answered. ‘I can root around at this end as to where the mistresses might have gone – good God, I don’t even know the names of the first three! – and if the search for any of them should take you to Glasgow…’

‘As for the corpse,’ Alec said, ‘I’d be best to ask around about here, don’t you think? If anyone saw anything? If anyone’s missing? And actually, if I were to pretend to be asking after the departed Mrs Aldo and her paramour, I’d have a handy way in.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And I shall try to find out if Fleur was close to any of the remaining mistresses or perhaps some of the girls and see if she ever spoke of her… exploits… to any of them.’

‘And so you might take a moment to chat to Sabbatina, in case she knows or can guess where her mother might have gone.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said, ‘but I can’t promise, Alec dear. There are rather a lot of other matters more pressing.’

‘Let’s start with the easy bit then,’ said Alec. I waited. ‘How do we determine whether Fleur Lipscott killed this unknown woman on Tuesday or Wednesday of this last week?’

‘Alibi.’

‘Exactly. Where was Miss Lipscott on those two days? Could she have gone out on the cliff and shoved someone off it?’

‘We don’t know that that’s how our corpse got in the water, though, do we?’ I said.

‘True,’ Alec agreed. ‘So… more generally, did Miss Lipscott have any periods of solitary time long enough to go boating? Or any time at the high tide to go swimming? If not…’

‘You’re beginning to doubt it?’ I asked. ‘You seemed sure enough when you were gaily telling all to Constable Reid.’

‘I am doubting,’ Alec said. ‘It’s what we’re taking to be the confession.’

‘You too? That’s been niggling at Constable Reid and me.’

‘Bright boy,’ Alec said.

‘But what else could she mean by saying “five”?’ I countered.

‘No, it’s not what she said, it’s when she said it.’ I sat up and snapped my fingers at him. ‘She looked at the corpse three days later and said it then.’

‘Of course,’ I said sinking back again. ‘She should have said it when the woman was plummeting down the cliff face, or just after she’d tipped her out of the boat, or held her under.’

‘Exactly. It was too late by miles by the time it came to the cable station. On the other hand, if it was said for your benefit, then the whole thing is so stagey I don’t believe it can actually be true. Why would a murderer say such a thing at such a moment? Was she the theatrical sort, when you knew her before?’

I smiled in spite of the dreadful conversation. Was little Fleur Lipscott theatrical? Not in the way Alec meant it. There was nothing insincere or calculated in the extravagance with which she lived. One always got the impression, on the contrary, that she would go on in just the same way in an empty room in an empty house, or indeed if washed up all alone on a desert island. I watched her once that summer, from under the walnut tree where we had tea almost every afternoon. She had been painting, dressed in a calico smock and a black beret (stuffed with the rats to stop it slipping over her ears), and she was about to leave her easel and palette on the lawn while she went in to change. I watched her dab two unused brushes into the paint and then thread them through the thumbhole of her palette along with the one she had really been using. I watched her reposition the palette on the grass, walking around to view the composition and replace it twice before she was happy. She even dragged the easel round a bit – away from the view – until it was framed against a yellow rose which scrambled over a pergola. Then she quickly added some blobs of yellow to her picture, walked round the whole thing again, nodded firmly and pelted off to the garden door and the nursery stairs, turning twice on the way to look at the pretty arrangement she had left behind her.

‘No,’ I said to Alec. ‘Not the least bit attention-seeking. Quite the most self-possessed little girl you could imagine.’

‘And once she was a big girl?’

‘Well, she was very silly and shocking,’ I said. ‘And I suppose she did play to the gallery. But in a very sort of full-blown way. For one thing she was still as lavishly fond of her family as ever. Not at all like those hard-faced little flappers who always made such a great point of being cold. Catch them coming to kiss their married sisters at a party! No, Fleur Lipscott, even at her silliest, was never furtive or calculated. If she seemed to be speaking to herself then she was, and if she whispered “Five” to herself then she meant it.’

‘Which makes no sense at all,’ Alec said.

‘Not much,’ I agreed. ‘But I like things not to make sense, Alec dear, as you know. For then there is something to catch hold of and straighten out about them.’ We smoked in silence for a while, each hoping to catch hold of a loose end immediately, each failing to do so.

‘Right,’ I said, at length. ‘First things first, I have to ring Pearl or Aurora and tell them the unwelcome news that Fleur is gone.’

‘Perhaps she’ll have been in touch already,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps she’s on her way home to them.’

‘We can hope. Now come with me and help me find a telephone. I only pray that there’s not just one on a table in the entrance hall. This conversation is going to be ticklish enough without eavesdroppers.’

We were in luck: finding an instrument I had not noticed in the staffroom, I sat down beside it and dialled for the exchange. While we were waiting, though, I changed my mind and held the earpiece out to Alec.

‘You talk to Pearl,’ I said. ‘She knows about you and I’d like to get your impression of her. Also, she won’t be so airy-fairy with you. We might actually learn something.’

But about that I was wrong, quite wrong. Alec started off the call in businesslike fashion, introducing himself and asking Pearl if she was alone, since he had some upsetting news and she should prepare herself to receive it. A wail came out of the ear trumpet and Alec flinched before trying again.

‘Not so bad as all that, Mrs Tennant,’ he said hurriedly, ‘but I’m afraid I have to tell you that Miss Lipscott has gone away. She has left St Columba’s, clearly not meaning to return. Now, I take it you have had no word from her?’ There was a pause. ‘And would you know if Mrs Forrester had heard from your sister?’ Another pause. ‘In that case, Mrs Tennant, I hope you’ll oblige me by answering a few quest-’ Here Pearl obviously cut him off again and during this pause, he blushed. ‘Osborne, yes,’ he said. ‘Dorset. No, in Perthshire these days.’ Then he blushed even harder, turning quite purple and making his freckles appear yellow. ‘She is indeed. Yes, we do. I most certainly am- Mrs Tennant, if I can just- A splendid chap. Most helpful to me in the matter of the farm. Mrs Tennant’ – his voice rose – ‘can I start by asking you this: as far as you know, has your sister ever committed any cri-’ I could hear Pearl squawking into the telephone from where I sat across the room (I had chosen a fireside chair as one does even when the grate is empty). ‘No I don’t mean the high-spirits of youth, my dear Mrs Te- Yes, indeed, I’ve snatched many a police helmet on treasure hunt nights myself, but that’s not what-’ Alec shook his head at me in dumb disbelief. It was his first exposure to a Lipscott outpouring and I took it that Dismay was just as profuse as Delight. ‘She hinted – no, she more than hinted – that she might have killed some-’ This time Alec tucked the earpiece into the crook of his neck and refilled his pipe while Pearl’s voice squeaked on and on. ‘Well, yes, we did wonder. Hm? Dandy and me. Yes, she is. Yes, I’m sure she would.’ I was signalling madly but he ignored me.

‘Hello, Pearl darling,’ I said, taking over and watching Alec go to flop in a chair.

‘Dandy, honestly!’ said Pearl down the line. She sounded tearful. ‘I asked you to take care of her and I told you to be gentle with her and it sounds absolutely as though you’ve trampled in in hobnailed boots like some beastly policeman.’

‘No need, dear,’ I said. ‘There is a real beastly policeman with perfectly good hobnailed boots of his own. And I should think he’ll be in touch very soon to ask you just what we’re asking you. There’s been a murder.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Pearl, rather surprisingly.

‘Or a death anyway,’ I said.

‘See? Don’t make such a melodrama, Dandy, you’re hardly helping.’

‘I had to go and look at the corpse, Pearl. It was melodramatic enough without anyone making it so. And Fleur as good as confessed that she-’ Pearl interrupted again.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Dandy, if I had thought for a moment you’d take this line… You know Fleur. She’s a darling, an angel, a cherub on a white clou-’

‘She was,’ I said, interrupting back. ‘She’s changed. I would like to know what changed her.’

‘I can’t listen to this,’ said Pearl. ‘From you of all people.’ I heard an ominous fumbling sound.

‘Don’t you dare hang up!’ I said and before I knew it Alec had taken the instrument back out of my hand.

‘Mrs Tennant,’ he said. ‘I’m well aware that Mrs Gilver is an old friend of your family but she is also a professional detective of the utmost integrity and moral scrupulousness. She cannot – we neither of us can – condone any-’ His voice was getting louder and lower and Pearl’s voice was getting higher and faster and they went on in this fashion for another good minute and then very abruptly Alec hung up the telephone.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘The pips went,’ he said. ‘But she got a good one in just before. We’ve been sacked, Dandy darling.’

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Not again.’

After which it seemed immediately necessary to take a walk down the cliff steps to the lounge bar of the Crown and a restorative glass of brandy. It was rather shudder-making, as even the best brandy in a small village inn is wont to be, but all the more invigorating for that.

‘Ugh, a little more soda, please,’ I said, after the first sip.

‘You should really develop your palate for whisky,’ Alec said, which suggestion made me shudder even more. ‘It’s a safer bet in these parts. This’ – he swirled his glass – ‘is delightful.’

‘So she didn’t take too kindly to the suggestion that Fleur is a killer, it’s safe to say.’ I was resuming the conversation which had begun as we picked our way down by the path.

‘Ah yes, but it wasn’t the outrage you’d feel were I to accuse Donald, Teddy or Hugh. It was a much more well-honed rejection.’

‘She’d heard it oft before?’

‘And she wasn’t having any of it.’ Alec nodded. ‘She didn’t actually put up any counter-arguments, you understand. Just poor little Fleurikins and how dare I. Poor sweet pixie and poppet and dear little elf, their poor darling mamma and sorry old pa and it was all extremely sickening, I must say.’

‘It seemed adorable when we were girls,’ I said, not liking to hear the familiar pet names repeated in quite that sneering way, no matter how nauseating I might find them myself on occasion.

‘But she was genuinely rattled,’ Alec went on, with a relish which was worse than the sneering. ‘Doing her best to pooh-pooh any notion of a murder but stammering with the strain. Poor little elf-f-f-f-f.’

I set my brandy glass down hard and stared at him.

‘That wasn’t stammering,’ I said. ‘Elf-f-f-f? Apart from anything else, no one stammers at the ends of words, do they?’

Alec, like most men, does not welcome criticism. Unlike most men, however, he sets that aside without a care when more important matters are in hand. At that moment, he barely noticed the criticism at all, but only sat forward in his chair as eager as a puppy and stared back at me.

‘You’ve got that look, Dan,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Elf-f-f-f,’ I said, ‘and I can’t believe you don’t know this but I suppose you’re rather young and from darkest Dorset, but Elf-f-f-f is the rather silly nickname of Edward Lionel Frederick Forrester-Franklin. Some sort of cousin of Aurora’s husband’s family.’

‘And?’ said Alec.

‘He died,’ I said. ‘In ’19 or possibly ’20.’

‘Eight years ago,’ Alec said. ‘And didn’t Pearl tell you…’

‘She did. That Fleur had got over the old bad time and been fine for eight years.’

‘Dear God, Dandy. What did he die of? Not old age, I take it.’

‘He was twenty-five,’ I said. ‘Suicide was the whisper, accident was what they put in The Times, but here’s the thing, darling. He died at Pereford. He died at Fleur’s family home.’