Bothersome Number of Corpses

6

I slept more soundly that night than I had any right to expect I would after the horrors of the day and I dreamed, blamelessly, of Hugh and the boys and some task unknown and undone, very glad upon waking that the poor ravaged corpse and the ghost of Edward Franklin had not visited me. I stretched out in my narrow bed feeling the sheets, which were adrift under my body, twist and wrinkle with my movements. (I had never perfected the art of bed-making even after some very fierce lessons from Matron at the convalescent home and had never imagined that I might feel the want of it, but those same maids who carted dirty supper plates around for the girls of St Columba’s really did leave tender new mistresses to struggle with their own linens.) My pillow was bursting out of the end of its case too, giving it an uncomfortable sort of waist and ruining any chance of a snooze.

With a sigh, I swung my legs down and felt for my slippers on the cold linoleum floor. If moved to thank heaven for small mercies, I could always be glad that the Crown’s brandy was too unpleasant to tempt me to a second and my head was clear this morning. I wondered how Alec, so delighted by the quality of the whisky, was faring; and I hoped that, at least, he remembered the rather detailed plan of attack we had formed the evening before.

I set the first part of the plan in motion over breakfast with the girls, choosing again the gaggle of sixth formers I had met at supper on Friday.

‘With a one and a two and one two three and!’ Miss Shanks shouted from the end of the room, the girls rose to their feet and the slow chorus began.

‘Dear Lord, thank you for this new day and this good food and all our friends. Amen.’

I mumbled along, unfamiliar with the wording, and then sat and spread my napkin as the girls flopped down all around me.

‘Dear Lord,’ said Katie as she did so, ‘thank you for the fact that Hammy doesn’t make us do that music-hall routine at breakfast at least.’

‘I thought the dinner grace was rather sweet!’ I said.

‘So did we for the first year or so,’ said Stella, breaking into a roll and craning her neck for the maid. ‘Ah, good,’ she said, when the child arrived at her elbow. I was astonished to see and smell a stream of dark steaming coffee pouring into Stella’s breakfast cup.

‘Miss?’ said the maid.

‘Th-thank you,’ I managed, holding my cup up across the table to her.

‘Ugh!’ said Eileen. ‘I dread being grown-up and married and having to drink nasty coffee in the morning instead of delicious chocolate.’

‘Oh, that won’t be the worst of it,’ Stella said, drooping one lazy eyelid and making Spring and Katie giggle.

‘Now, now, girls,’ I said mildly, although privately just as startled by the talk as I was by the coffee. ‘Now, let me see… what did I mean to ask you…? Oh yes, what are you reading in English just now? I have a great deal of prep to do today.’

‘You mean French, Miss Gilver,’ said Sally, smiling rather shyly at her own temerity in correcting me.

‘Ah no, English,’ I said. ‘I thought perhaps you would have heard, but I suppose Miss Shanks will announce it at chapel. Miss Lipscott has been… called away and, since Miss Glennie came to help out with the French lessons, I’m taking over English.’

‘Juliet’s gone?’ said Spring. ‘Miss Lipscott, I mean? Not another one!’

‘She has been forced to take a leave of absence owing to a family emerg-’ I began before remembering that ‘family emergency’ was precisely the tale Miss Shanks had been spouting about them all.

‘Thank God,’ said Stella. ‘Escape! Relief! We can read anything you like, Miss Gilver, and we’ll be your devoted slaves if it’s not what we’ve been reading, I can tell you.’

‘Stella!’ This was in chorus from Eileen and Sally. ‘We can’t change books now. We’ve been studying all year for our Higher Cert.’

‘Speak for yourselves,’ said Spring. ‘I’ve been not studying all year and just hoping to be overtaken by a natural disaster before the exam!’

‘And the papers might be written already,’ said Katie.

‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘Examination papers can’t be written and lying around.’

‘Not lying around,’ said Spring. ‘Locked up in the safe until they go to the printers and then locked up again when they return. Miss Shanks is nuts on cheating.’

‘Well, I’m not about to change books this late in the term anyway,’ I said stoutly.

‘You know best, Miss Gilver,’ said Stella. She had a special way of being horribly insolent without saying anything on which one could lay one’s finger.

‘So what are you reading?’ I asked them.

‘Paradise Lost,’ said Eileen. ‘Miss Lipscott loves it.’

‘Juliet hates it as much as the rest of us!’ said Katie. ‘She just thinks that reading hateful boring tripe is good for the soul.’

There was so much about this remark I should have pounced upon, from the casual use of the nickname, past the intemperate language, to the disparaging of the great John Milton, but so panicked was I by the thought of having to teach a single sensible thing about such a poem that I said nothing, instead shooting off to the sideboard, ostensibly to fetch some eggs and bacon, but really because Miss Shanks was standing there and I felt an urgent need to reassure myself. A bit of Scott and Shakespeare, she had said. Paradise Lost was far beyond both my brief and the pale.

‘Exams, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘The papers. The girls said they were written and that the upper sixth is studying Milton. I’m sure they’re just teasing the new girl?’ My voice went up at the end and sounded as unsure as could be.

‘Milton, eh?’ said Miss Shanks. She was stirring a pot of scrambled egg with a wooden spirtle and in her black church costume and already wearing a black church hat she looked rather witchy. ‘Well, Miss Lipscott was a one for that kind of thing.’

‘But the papers?’ I said. ‘Do I have to write an exam paper? On Paradise Lost?’

‘No, no, no, it’s written, Miss Gilver. The upper sixth and the fifth form are accounted for. School Certs, you know. It’s just the first to fourth forms and the lower sixth you need to take care of.’

‘Oh!’ I said, standing with the chafing dish lid in my hand, letting the uncovered bacon get cold. ‘Is that all? And do you happen to know what sort of stuff…’

‘You’ve all day after chapel to prepare, Miss Gilver,’ said Miss Shanks. She had finally got the scrambled egg stirred up to her satisfaction and now she scraped a great heap of it onto her plate with the spirtle and left me there. As my eyes followed her back to her place I saw that our little interchange had not gone unnoticed. Miss Christopher was watching me. She glanced at Miss Shanks and at Miss Barclay and back to me, saw me looking at her and finally lowered her gaze as though to spread toast with butter took all the concentration with which she had learned to subject a frog to dissection.

‘Well,’ I said, sitting back down. ‘Why ever Miss McLintock and Miss Stanley left, it wasn’t because of muddle in the organisation.’

‘What?’ said Spring.

‘Who?’ said Sally.

‘You were right, girls,’ I said. ‘The Higher Cert exam papers are written already and safely under lock and key.’

‘Who’s Miss Stanley?’ said Katie. ‘Was she before our time?’

‘Golly, how long have the mistresses being fleeing St Cucumber’s?’ said Eileen.

‘Maybe,’ I said, mentally crossing my fingers, ‘I got the names wrong. Weren’t they the science and history mistresses?’ I looked around their faces. ‘No?’

My ploy worked, as I had thought it would, for who can resist the chance to correct another’s mistakes, especially when that other is an elder and better? They filled the air with all the information I needed, babbling and chirruping over one another like a family of day-old chicks squabbling in their dust bath and, concentrating hard, I caught it all.

The science mistress had been a Miss Bell (called Tinker, affectionately by the girls) who had departed two years ago. Miss Taylor the history mistress, mystifyingly referred to as The Maid, had gone with her; and a Miss Blair, who had taken the girls for gym and music, had left just before an important hockey match.

‘And of course, dear Fräulein Fielding, who died at Christmas time,’ said Sally, her eyes misting. ‘She was the most marvellous Latin scholar, Miss Gilver. Not like old Plumface who just translates battle after battle and makes us draw tables of verbs.’

‘Miss Fielding died just this last Christmas?’ I said.

‘Golly no, two years since,’ said Sally. ‘And a half. And no one left when she was here. Misses Taylor and Bell were pals of old.’

I was rather disappointed in the selection of names – I had been hoping for something more prominent upon which to hang the next part of my ruse, but I did my best, walking to chapel alongside Miss Lovage, the art mistress.

‘The girls seem very fond of you all,’ I said, to start things off. Miss Lovage raised her striking profile to an even more glamorous angle, whether from pride in her girls’ fondness or the better to sniff the sea air I could not say. ‘They seem terribly to miss Miss Fielding and Miss Blair.’ The imposing chin came down a bit at that and Miss Lovage turned to look at me.

‘Miss Blair?’ she said.

‘I wondered if it could possibly be the same Miss Blair I know from my own schooldays,’ I said. ‘At St Leonards. Over twenty years ago now. A little Irishwoman with flame-red hair?’ Of course I had not been to school at St Leonards or anywhere else for that matter and the flame-haired Irishwoman was my own invention, but once again it worked for me.

‘Can’t be,’ said Miss Lovage. ‘Emily Blair was Scotch and Amazonian and what hair she let grow on her head was mouse. Did you say the girls loved her? Who have you been talking to?’

‘Ohh…’ I said.

‘My girls – the painters and sculptors – hated all that. Endless hockey all winter and cricket, if you can believe it, in the summer term. Cricket!’

‘That does seem a little odd,’ I said. We were nearing the church now and I plunged on before we should arrive and have the conversation cut off by song and prayer. ‘Odd too to find a Scotswoman with a yen for cricket. I wonder if she gets the chance where she is now.’ I paused but nothing came out of Miss Lovage’s ruby-red painted lips. ‘Do you know where she moved on to?’ I said but, as usual, the direct question shut the conversation down like a slammed door. Miss Lovage merely stared at me down her dramatic nose and then threw her dramatic scarf back around her neck with a gesture (dramatic, of course) presumably meant to brush me and my question away. I was not, however, to be so easily brushed.

‘Or perhaps she didn’t take up another position?’ I said. ‘If she left in the rush she seems to have…’

‘You are remarkably inquisitive about your fellow man,’ said Miss Lovage.

‘Inquisitiveness is rather to be encouraged, though, wouldn’t you say?’ I replied. ‘As a schoolmistress and a shaper of young minds, one would expect you to be all for it.’

‘A mind which enquires into Life and celebrates Beauty,’ said Miss Lovage, ‘is greatly to be encouraged, of course. But the quotidian minutiae of strangers’ lives has never enthralled me.’

She sounded, as Donald and Teddy say, as though she had swallowed a dictionary.

‘Miss Blair was hardly a stranger to you,’ I insisted, ‘and although she and I did not overlap, as a new mistress where she was an old one, I’m naturally interested in what became of her.’

‘What do you mean “new mistress”?’ said Miss Lovage, quite forgetting to drawl and letting her face fall into its natural lines, without arched eyebrows or stretched neck. ‘Miss Shanks said a French mistress of impeccable pedigree had arrived from the agency.’

‘Oh, she did,’ I said. ‘Incredible pedigree, really. But haven’t you heard? Miss Lipscott is gone. I’m taking over English for her.’ Miss Lovage reared backwards like an adder about to strike. ‘For a while anyway,’ I said.

‘But how can you switch from French to English?’ she said. ‘Which are you?’

‘Oh, I’m a…’ I sought desperately for some phrase other than that – jack of all trades – which had sprung to my mind. ‘I’m a generalist, Miss Lovage.’

‘This is an outrage,’ Miss Lovage said, rather rudely to say the least. ‘Excuse me, Miss Gilver. I must speak to the headmistress right away.’

With that, she shot forward to where Miss Shanks was stumping along and I dropped back and fell into step with Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher, together again like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

‘I’ve upset Miss Lovage,’ I told them.

‘Not difficult,’ said Miss Barclay, with a world of scorn in her voice for artists and their flighty ways.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Miss Christopher.

‘Well, I was asking about Miss Blair to start with,’ I said. ‘Which she didn’t like at all.’ The chalky little titter of Miss Barclay and the rattling chuckle of Miss Christopher were loud enough to cause some of the girls to turn and stare.

‘Hardly a surprise!’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Not much kindred spirit there.’

‘Because of the cricket?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you heard about the cricket, did you?’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Some of the mummies and daddies didn’t think it was quite nice. And such a waste of the lovely new tennis courts too. Not to mention her taste in music.’

‘Violins?’ I asked. I could think of nothing worse than the sound of children learning to play the violin.

‘Bagpipes,’ said Miss Barclay.

‘Dear God!’

‘But Miss Shanks took over when Blair left us in the lurch, and the girls are just as well off with callisthenics and country walks. And Mrs Tully in the village is happy to listen to them playing their scales.’

We were at the church gate now, joining the rest of the flock being gathered in under the stern eye of a black-garbed minister who stood on the step, and it was impossible to resist the unspoken command to stop talking and stare at the ground as one passed him. Just as well, I daresay, for how could I relate Miss Lovage’s horror at the makeshift way I had dropped French and taken up English to two women who were cribbing science and history by staying one page ahead of the girls in the textbooks?

During the service I had plenty of time for quiet reflection, for the rites of the Church of Scotland – in which there are no kneeling and no responses and what little standing is required is heavily cued by the organ – give one’s mind a blissful chance to wander with no one able to tell. Actual snoring is frowned upon, but pew after pew of glazed, slumping parishioners dreaming of their dinners is the sight which greets many a minister of that kirk every week, I am sure.

And so after the service, when I excused myself from the walk along the promenade and dodged into the Crown by the back way, I felt I had plenty to tell.

To my surprise and slight annoyance, Alec was not alone in the parlour but was sharing a glass of beer and a plate of sandwiches with an off-duty Constable Reid, rather resplendent in britches and a golfing jersey and with a pancake of a golfing cap lying beside him on the settle.

‘The sarge’s no’ buying it,’ he said. ‘Good news for you, missus.’

‘Buying what?’ I asked.

Constable Reid took a pull at his pint glass before replying.

‘Five murders. Or even one murder. I’ve telt him all about Miss Lipscott – good family, went off the rails, teachin’ in a school, livin’ like a nun – and he reckons she’s likely a wee bit’ – he twirled his hand beside his head and whistled – ‘and no need to listen to her.’

‘But she has to be found!’ I said. I had had a complete change of heart in the matter of Fleur’s protection, thinking that if the police wanted her for murder, they would work all the more for her safe return.

‘We don’t know how she got away,’ said Reid. ‘She didn’t get on the train here nor Stranraer nor Glenluce as far as the station masters can recall – and she’d have had a wheen of luggage, mind.’

‘Stranraer?’ I said.

‘I already asked about a ferry-boat,’ said Alec. ‘No joy. And she didn’t hire a car or ring anybody to come and get her.’

‘And she’s no’ holed up in any wee place in town or in Portlogan that takes in guests unless they’re lyin’ and why would they? So there you have it. She’s gone.’

‘And Sergeant Turner is simply washing his hands of her?’ I said.

‘I told him what you told me,’ said Reid. ‘That they women are always taking off. He’ll send her lines out – her description – to the other forces but nobody’s reported her missin’ and so…’ He shrugged.

‘Can I report her missing?’ He was shaking his head already. ‘Her headmistress? Or one of her sisters?’

‘Aye, a sister for sure,’ said Reid. ‘Then we’ll have another wee look-see.’

‘But in the meantime, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘it’s you and me.’

‘And what about the corpse?’ I said.

‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper,’ said Reid. ‘We’re asking the ferries and the fishing boats – no’ that our fishermen would have a woman aboard, mind – and asking down the coast if anyone’s missin’ and we’ll just need to wait till somebody pipes up.’

‘And no clues from the body itself?’ I said. ‘Did someone search the headland?’ Reid was nodding. ‘And question passers-by?’ Now his eyes flashed. ‘Yes, I do mean Cissie,’ I said. ‘If she was there on her own, noticing Mrs Aldo with her mysterious companion, she might have noticed someone else too.’

‘But only on Tuesday evening and only at that spot, Dan,’ said Alec.

‘Better than nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to the girl and do it gently.’

‘Or me,’ Alec said.

‘I think you’ll have other fish to fry,’ I said. ‘Do you suppose you could impersonate a distressed headmaster, or a doting and wealthy father of at least five?’ I sailed on without waiting for a reply. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking. How many gym-cum-music mistresses can there possibly be in this rather small country – Scotland, that is – who like to get their charges playing cricket and bagpipes?’ Neither man answered. ‘Now, if Miss Blair left suddenly in the middle of a term – and I think she did – wouldn’t she most likely apply with some haste to an agency to find work? And even if she didn’t, mightn’t an agency know her of old?’

‘And I what?’ said Alec. ‘I ring up pretending to want a woman to teach cricket?’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘Wouldn’t it be easier for you simply to keep digging for a home address or something?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘On two counts, no. First, if I “dig” they’ll get suspicious, and secondly you can do this right now instead of waiting. And if you find one ex-mistress you can ask her about the others.’

‘But why start with Blair?’ said Alec.

‘The other two have even more dispiritingly ordinary names – Taylor and Bell.’

‘What’s ordinary about Lipscott and Bow-clark?’ said Reid, making me flush.

‘Very sound point, Constable,’ I said. ‘Although it’s a bit quick to expect Fleur to be back on the books.’

‘I’ll eat my hat if she turns up on agency books at all,’ said Alec. ‘She’s lying low, mark my words. Mademoiselle Beauclerc though… could be.’ He thought for a moment, sucking on his unlit pipe in that disgusting way (the very thought of what it must taste like made me grimace). ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘not getting a whiff of them doesn’t mean anything. They might have gone home to their people.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘But if we did find Miss Blair, for instance, happily coaching some pigtailed first eleven somewhere, we could stop worrying that she’d been murdered.’

‘No’ that again,’ said Reid. ‘If the body we’ve got the now isn’t the French one, why think there’s anything in it that four other teachers went away?’

‘Because I still don’t believe we can be sure that the corpse isn’t Miss Beauclerc,’ I said, to a chorus of their groans. ‘I know Miss Lipscott said not, but she ran away straight afterwards. And I know Miss Barclay said not, but…’ Both of them sat forward and opened their eyes very wide. ‘I don’t trust her,’ I finished lamely. ‘I don’t trust anyone in that place.’

‘So there’s nae use gettin’ a third opinion then?’ said Reid. ‘If they’re all as bad as each other.’

‘I’d trust one of the girls,’ I said, ‘but we couldn’t possibly ask it of them. No, I think we just have to try to track down Miss Beauclerc and if we fail to… then track down her family and… no distinguishing marks at all, Constable? Moles, scars, birthmarks?’ Reid, brick-red in the face once more, simply shook his head. ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘When can I speak to Cissie?’

‘We’re all quits, aren’t we?’ said Reid, rather wary. ‘The police are no’ botherin’ your friend and so you’re no’ tryin’ to set Cissie against me, eh no? Aye, well come and meet us on the links this afternoon then. After three. It’s right behind the school. You can’t miss it.’

‘She’s a golfer too?’ I said. This was surprising in a parlour maid, to my mind.

‘Naw,’ said Reid, blushing a little again. ‘She’s… she just, if I’m playin’ a round she…’

‘You’re not trying to say she caddies for you?’ said Alec.

‘She lugs your clubs around on her afternoon free?’ I said.

‘Naw!’ said Reid. ‘They’re on a wee set o’ trolley wheels. She just pulls them along.’

He retired with a great air of wounded dignity, leaving Alec and me to burst into laughter behind him, like a pair of schoolgirls when a mistress leaves the room.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘This Cissie must be a bit of limp rag.’

‘She seemed lively enough to me,’ Alec said. ‘Perhaps PC Reid has hidden charms. Now, to the part we couldn’t discuss in front of him.’

‘Elf,’ I said. ‘Where does one begin?’

‘With the newspapers of the day and the report of the inquest, I suppose,’ Alec said.

‘But those will only tell you what I’ve told you anyway.’

‘Oh quite, quite, but I was thinking more of gathering names of individuals one might talk to. I still think that’s a better use of my time than haring after Miss Blair in that unlikely way. Either that, or asking around for anyone who might have seen our corpse when she was alive. Under cover of tracing Mrs Aldo, you know. For today at least, since it’s Sunday and I can’t start pestering librarians or teachers’ employment agencies until tomorrow.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said reluctantly. ‘And I could try to think of a way to dig some more without arousing suspicions. If only they hadn’t met me already I could present myself as an inveterate nosy-parker and they’d think nothing of my questions.’

‘Ask the girls,’ said Alec. ‘No one so self-centred as the young. They’ll think nothing at all.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘And I need to establish Fleur’s movements during the time our corpse might have died anyway. I hate having to call her “our corpse”. Can’t we think of something less grisly?’

‘Why don’t we call her No. 5?’ suggested Alec. I stared at him, disbelieving, for what could possibly be more grisly than that?

‘I’ll start with Sabbatina Aldo,’ I said, pulling on my gloves and preparing myself for departure. ‘You never know – she might be able to tell us something about her mother’s movements too.’

‘Onwards, then,’ said Alec, rising as I did.

‘And most certainly upwards,’ I replied, thinking of the cliff steps to St Columba’s, which were not getting any less steep and arduous for the number of times I had climbed them.

It was a pleasant prospect, however, the gusting clouds and the sparkling sea, and I noticed for the first time the golf links on the headland behind the school, where the pancake caps of the men could be seen sprouting on the greens and fairways like mushrooms. I saw, too, a fair few splashes of custard yellow: St Columba’s girls in their shirtsleeves, getting in a round before luncheon on this unusually mild day.

The entrance hall was deserted and the corridors silent, only the good rich smell of roasting beef wafting up from the kitchens to say that anyone was at work inside these walls, so instead of trying to find the needle of Sabbatina Aldo in the haystack of girls around the pool and courts and grounds I set off for Fleur’s classroom – Miss Shanks had given me sketchy directions the evening before – in slim hopes of some letters or papers she might have left behind and in rather plumper dread of what reins, besides Milton, I might discover I had to take up when the following school day dawned.

Her classroom was on the seaward side, long and sunny, with high glittering windows, white-distempered walls and broad black floorboards, surely as Spartan as even the tenant of Fleur’s monastic sleeping cell could desire. There was not a picture, nor a bookshelf, nor the lowliest pot of daisies on the mustard-painted fireplace, just six rows of forms facing a large desk set up on a small dais, with a blackboard behind.

I sat in Fleur’s chair and opened the top of the three desk drawers, finding in there such tidiness and order that my hopes, slender as they had been, dwindled to threads and blew away. Pens and ink, a wiper, fresh sheets for the blotter, a red pencil and its little box sharpener, a cloth-covered block for cleaning the board and a packet of white chalk. In short, nothing.

In the second drawer, however, there was something indeed. I drew it all out and spread it on the desktop, letting my horrified eyes rest on each item in turn until I had been round them all.

Milton, to my creeping dismay, was not the half of it. The lower sixth were engaged, granted, on studying Shakespeare (as Miss Shanks had so airily suggested all her girls might be) but no frothy comedy or worthy history for them! King Lear was the order of the day. Fleur’s copy had girls’ names pasted over the list of dramatis personae, which I took to indicate that it was being read aloud in the classroom, but there were also some beastly comprehension questions scrawled on slips of paper and tucked into the pages here and there.

I turned, faintly, from the long, frantic speech towards the end of Act IV where the volume had fallen open and gave my attention to the books upon which Fleur had decided the budding minds of the middle forms should grow rich and be enlightened. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales glared balefully up at me from the desktop and my heart sank deep down into me like a pebble lobbed into a well. The poor girls! I had slogged through The Pilgrim’s Progress myself as a small child, weeping with boredom and hating Christian like poison, but those were the times and that was the excuse for it. These days there could surely be none. As for The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, I had managed to stagger thus far through my life without knowledge of a single line of either and, leafing through a little of each, was only sorry that my run of luck had ended. John Donne for the lower fourth seemed a bright spot until I cast my eyes over Fleur’s notes and saw that, of all his works, she had selected the Holy Sonnets, which was tiresomeness beyond imagining.

The first and second forms, in their tender years, had been spared maddened kings, pious allegories and epic poetry and were allotted instead novels, and nineteenth-century novels at that, but of all the wondrous outpourings of that miraculous age Fleur had plumped – as though to quell any danger of enjoyment – for The Water Babies and Silas Marner.

‘Silas Marner?’ I muttered, remembering how I had snorted with impatience at the tiresome old fool and his sickening little darling. I closed it and pinched the pages between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Well, at least it’s short.’ The Water Babies I had, admittedly, loved when I was too young to know better but when I unearthed it to read to my sons in their nursery, I had very soon re-earthed it again, deep into a trunk in an attic, aghast at its feverish insistence on death and sacrifice and its unwholesome obsession with staying pure and clean (and with fish, one has to say). Mr Kingsley would have given those Austrian doctors a good gallop round the paddock if he had ever submitted to them, I remember thinking.

And so this was what little Fleur Lipscott had picked to share with the poor unfortunate girls. I could hardly believe it. Where was Robinson Crusoe? Where Gulliver? Where Oliver and Pip and Alice and Cathy and all her friends from childhood? For Fleur had spent all day every rainy day – and portions even of fine ones – holed up in a loft with a bag of toffees, and I recalled her emerging with shining eyes and demanding paper and pens and solitude while she began her Great Novel.

‘With islands and pirates and pickpockets and a raging fire and orphans and a stolen inheritance and a wedding,’ she had announced to us all. ‘And a ghost. Don’t disturb me until it’s done.’

I cast my eyes over the seven volumes before me on the desk, doubting whether there was a single pirate amongst the lot of them, and went on a treasure hunt for what I was sure must exist somewhere.

I was right: in the big cupboard built into the corner of the room, where exercise books and bottles of ink were stored (and also, I noticed, a large trunk full of veils and swords and the like to help with the acting out of the plays), there was a bookcase, and upon that bookcase by the mercy of Providence were still ranged the books which had held sway in the English classroom of St Columba’s before the strange Miss Lipscott had swept them away.

A very happy twenty minutes later I had made my selections. The little ones were to have Kidnapped, the second form Rob Roy, the third form (who deserved the most pity of all after The Canterbury Tales) were to be rewarded with Tam o’Shanter. The lower fourth were going to see a side of Donne at which his Holy Sonnets had not hinted, although I would avoid the farthest reaches: they were fifteen, after all, not forty. The fifth had to stick with Piers Plowman for their exam but I would intersperse it with Jane Eyre as a corrective. The lower sixth, I decided, could leave King Lear out on the moor to take his chances and turn to the rather more thrilling adventures of Macbeth instead and, to soothe the troubled brains of the upper sixth, busy cramming Paradise Lost, I would require them to read one each day of Shakespeare’s sonnets starting with ‘O, never say that I was false of heart’, Sonnet 109, which was my favourite. (Already I could tell that the power of being the schoolmistress, with the key to the cupboard where the books were kept, was going to my head and threatening to ruin me.)

At luncheon, where the roast beef fulfilled every bit of its fragrant promise, although one could have played deck quoits with the Yorkshire puddings (for no doubt the cook was a Scotchwoman and it will out somewhere), I slipped the tiniest little border trowel into the palm of my hand and did as minute and discreet a portion of digging as could properly be called digging at all.

‘What of your extra-curricular hours, girls?’ I said. ‘I’m very happy to take over Miss Lipscott’s duties there.’

‘Cramming,’ said Katie.

‘Yes, stuffing Paradise down our gullets like pelicans with herrings,’ said Spring. She had taken the news that it was too late to change the examination paper very badly.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, poor dears. I remember it well.’ This was a lie, of course; I had never sat an examination in my life unless one could count the beady-eyed way I was watched making introductions at finishing-school sherry parties (and in all honesty one could not). ‘But the other forms? Do you happen to know? Did Miss Lipscott have a weekly round?’ Five pairs of eyes gazed back at me, with varying expressions of interest and disdain, but none with comprehension. ‘Sewing Club on a Monday, Rambling Club on a Tuesday, Country Dancing on a Wednesday, that sort of thing…?’ I had put the notion of rambling on a Tuesday into the list with great care.

‘Oh no, the mistresses don’t concern themselves much with our Societies,’ said Sally. ‘Too busy marking.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And what Societies are there?’

‘Well, not sewing, thank goodness,’ said Stella. ‘And not country dancing – what a thought.’

‘We used to have all sorts of dancing but there’s none now,’ said Sally.

‘Miss Lovage does teach Dance,’ said Eileen. ‘But Dance isn’t dancing, really.’ Spring and Katie began to giggle.

‘Imagine going to a party and doing Miss Lovage’s Dance!’

‘Imagine at our coming-out balls. If we did Dance!’

‘We’d be taken to a sanatorium and tied to our beds with stout rope.’

‘Now, now,’ I said, although my lips were twitching. ‘And what about rambling? One would have thought with these lovely cliff walks and the ruined castles and all…’

‘I think some of the younger girls tramp about a bit,’ said Stella. ‘Especially the Scotch ones.’

‘It’s on Sunday afternoons,’ said Eileen. ‘Quite fun, actually. We – they, I mean – they take nature sheets and try to collect things. Almost like a treasure hunt, you see?’

‘Sunday afternoons,’ I said. ‘Right-ho.’ There was no chance that No. 5 had been in the water six days so, no matter how many girls had been tramping about the cliffs with nature sheets at the last ramblers’ outing, they could not have seen anything useful to me. I tried another tack. ‘I didn’t realise that the art mistress might teach dancing too,’ I said.

‘Not dancing, Miss Gilver,’ said Katie. ‘Daahhhnce!’ The giggles started to break out once more and I did not have to summon any schoolmistressishness to start tutting.

‘You’re all very silly for such great big girls,’ I said. ‘I could excuse it in the little ones. What of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell? Had they other strings to their bow? I’m afraid I shall only be teaching English to you. Although I do have some circus training, I suppose.’ Thus I attempted to ingratiate and glamorise myself with them, and certainly I loosened their tongues.

‘Tinker Bell and The Maid were scholars, Miss Gilver,’ said Spring.

‘The Maid?’ I said.

‘Of Orleans,’ said Katie. ‘History mistress, you see?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And so Juliet for Miss Lipscott, because of Shakespeare?’

‘Scholars,’ went on Spring without answering my interruption, ‘dry, dusty and devoted. No time for anything else. They and Miss Fielding were all at Somerville together – pioneers of the day – and we always thought – that is, Mummy always told me – that they had to be whiter than white. No high jinks or they’d be out on their ear.’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest high jinks!’ I said. ‘Astronomy, perhaps. Or woodcarving.’

‘Or circus tricks, quite,’ drawled Stella.

‘What kind of circus tricks?’ Sally asked. ‘I’d love to be able to juggle.’

‘Oh, me too,’ said Spring. ‘Or standing up on a horse in a bathing suit. Just to annoy Daddy. He’s still quite keen on side-saddle, Miss Gilver, if you can believe it these days.’

‘Dogs,’ I said, and it was rather difficult to keep mopping up gravy with the last of my Yorkshire pudding while crossing my fingers. ‘I can’t juggle myself but I have a Dalmatian at home who can.’ I warmed to it and uncrossed my fingers. There was a kernel of truth in this. Bunty had never quite forgotten the wonderful things she had learned in her short sojourn at the circus three years before and even my bumbling instead of the expertise of the circus folk could not dislodge it.

‘Golly,’ said Eileen. ‘I wish you’d brought him. What fun.’ I nodded and smiled, knowing that Bunty was safely stuck in Perthshire and my fibs would never come back to haunt me.

The maids appeared then to clear the main course and the girls went through their familiar craning and straining to see what pudding might be, looking quite a bit like liberty horses arching their necks in formation in the ring. I was content with what the luncheon table had given to me and did not need the delights of the pudding. Miss Bell and Miss Taylor had been at Oxford with Miss Fielding. It would be easy, I was sure, to track their movements now, for were not these bluestockings all as thick as thieves and did they not gather together for reunions as regularly as migrating flocks of birds alighting on their oceanic islands?

‘What about bird watching?’ I said, as the thought struck me. ‘I’m rather an ornithologist.’ More lies, but I was thinking, rather desperately, of what might be seen through binoculars. ‘Or does one of the other mistresses already help out there?’

‘Not any more,’ said Sally.

‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I asked, with a leap of hope. For how easy it would be, if one’s attention was trained on a distant speck, to take a fateful step too close to the cliff edge and plunge into the sea.

‘Miss Lipscott,’ said Eileen. ‘Owls.’

‘I thought it was bats,’ said Katie.

‘Making her a chiropterologist,’ said Eileen, ‘and not an ornithologist at all.’

‘Well, it was night anyway,’ said Spring.

‘Twas the nightingale and not the lark,’ said Stella.

‘Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou?’ said Katie in a fluttery voice and all five of them, even the haughty Stella, were soon tittering.

I had meant to ask them to point out Sabbatina Aldo for me, although I could not quite see what reason I could give to allay suspicion about my interest in her, but rolling my eyes at their silliness and looking away to other parts of the room, I thought I had spotted her without assistance. Amongst the third form there was a child with luxurious raven tresses who could not possibly be either an English rose nor a Scotch thistle (as Grant always described her countrywomen, on account of their dry fair hair and their cheeks purple from the cold). Besides her colouring, she was sitting slightly alone although at a table of twelve, looking as diffident in her neatness as a scholarship girl (or the beneficiary of a wealthy patron anyway) would look amongst the Stellas and Springs of this world.

First, though, for the obliging Cissie, who might have seen all manner of going-on on the cliff top last Tuesday evening and might yet have more to tell of Mrs Aldo’s mysterious lover, if one asked the right questions and if one were a kind lady of forty-one instead of a mortifyingly handsome young man.

She was a short and wiry little person, with a slight cast to her left eye and an upper lip larger than the lower one by just about the proportion that a lower lip should be larger than the upper. She was saved, however, by a finely chiselled nose, apple cheeks and a shining cap of bright hair done in the latest style, of which one could see rather a lot owing to the tiny dimensions of her fashionable hat, chosen for the company rather than the setting. All in all, one could see what a young man might find appealing about her, especially since when I discovered her with Reid at the third tee she was gazing at him with slightly cross-eyed but nonetheless heartfelt devotion and hugging his clubs as an obvious substitute for his manly form.

‘Reid,’ I said, nodding. ‘And Cissie.’ She let go of the clubs and bobbed nicely. ‘You’ll just have to slum it for a while,’ I said to the constable. ‘Carry your own clubs – it won’t kill you. Cissie, my dear, I’d like you to come for a little walk with me.’ She looked at Reid for approval and when he gave a short nod – although with not a whisper of good grace about it – she opened her little bag, put on her Sunday gloves and waited expectantly for me to lead her.

‘Now then,’ I said, when we were under way, before remembering the kind lady and hastily parking the schoolmistress-cum-nanny as whom I had begun. ‘That’s a very pretty hat, is it new?’ Cissie nodded and put a hand up to touch it. I wondered if she was still at the age when she would stop walking and bend over her skirts to look at a new pair of shoes she was wearing. ‘So your mistress doesn’t have any silly notions of you dressing plainly even on free afternoons then?’ Cissie very properly said nothing. ‘Only Reid said she was a bit of a tartar.’ Again, Cissie said nothing but she did allow herself a small smile. ‘I’m glad to hear she’s not as unreasonable as all that,’ I said, ‘but I do want to assure you, my dear, that anything you say to me is in the strictest confidence.’

‘I brought it out in ma handbag,’ said Cissie. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about the startling hat, but only another moment to realise that she had shown herself to be my ally.

‘Dear me, how old-fashioned of her,’ I said. ‘Now then,’ – cosily, this time, with nothing of the nanny anywhere – ‘I know because your fiancé told me’ – there was a gasp – ‘oh, yes he told me that too and as I say – strictest confidence – anyway, I know that last Tuesday evening you saw someone on the cliffs at Dunskey Castle. I would like you tell me all about it in your own words.’

‘Rosie the washerwoman, ye mean?’ said Cissie.

‘In your own words,’ I said.

‘Aye, I seen her,’ said Cissie. ‘Walking along the path with a man. So I just ducked in a wee bit behind a bush – gorse it was and right scratchy – so’s she didnae see me. That’s all, madam.’

In story books, witnesses invited to speak in their own words always obligingly rattle on for hours spilling reams of detailed clues and red herrings, so the disappointment was a heavy one. I started the list of questions I had hoped to avoid.

‘You didn’t know the man?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But can you describe him?’

‘He was quite big.’

‘Fat?’

‘Aye, a bit. And tall. Dark too. Well, it was dark, but he didn’t look fair.’

‘Young? Old?’

‘No,’ said Cissie slowly. ‘I wouldnae have said he was young. And he couldnae have been old because of…’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I never said this to that other man,’ she whispered and my heart quickened. ‘But he couldnae have been old because of how they were… I mean, they were definitely… I mean, he wasn’t her uncle.’ My heart slowed again, so suddenly that I felt the slump as a slight dizziness. What an innocent she was, despite the ‘sitting’. Of course, we had guessed at once that the partner of a moonlit walk on the cliffs ‘wasn’t her uncle’.

‘And what exactly makes you say so?’ I asked. ‘What did you see them do?’

‘Do?’ said Cissie, blushing. ‘Nothing. Just the way they were walking along and the way they were talking. Well, the way he was talking to her.’

‘You heard what they were saying?’ I said.

‘I heard them talking,’ Cissie said. ‘I didnae understand it, though.’

‘Hm,’ I said, almost blushing myself at that. ‘Just as well, I daresay. And they passed along and didn’t turn back while you were there? You only saw them once?’

‘Aye,’ said Cissie. ‘And I was watching out for them too – didnae want Rosie to see me.’

‘And so you would have seen anyone else who was about?’ I said.

‘Who?’ she said, glancing at me. ‘Did somebody see Wullie and me?’

‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find out if anyone was around. If you saw or heard anything. Anyone calling out, or any kind of disturbance?’

‘No,’ said Cissie. ‘It was right quiet for such a nice warm night. Sometimes you can see smoke or wee red dots if it’s dark. From folks’ cigarettes that are sittin’ in the dips. But no last Tuesday.’

‘And you heard nothing either?’ She shook her head. ‘And I don’t suppose you were there on Monday and Wednesday.’ Cissie took great offence at this, as though one unchaperoned walk a week was blameless but three would ruin her.

‘I was not, madam,’ she said. ‘And I tell you somethin’ else too. I wish I hadn’t gone the night I did. I’ve had it up to here wi’ all these questions.’

And so since there was really no point in badgering her – she had been at only one of the places on the cliffs where No. 5 might have gone over, and at only one time when it might have happened – I let her go back to the honour of trundling ‘Wullie’s’ golf clubs around all afternoon and turned my own steps to the school.

What I really wanted was to find the mistresses in their staffroom together and in the mood for chatting. How difficult could it be to get them talking about their departed colleagues? How I should love to be able to present Alec, in the morning, with a list of their full names and approximate home addresses. My quick peek around the staffroom door, however, revealed that chamber empty of grate and of armchair again, and my surreptitious pause outside Miss Christopher’s door yielded only the scratch of a pen and the rustle of paper. I abandoned the plan, grabbed a passing child and demanded that she find Betty Alder and send her to my classroom to meet me.

If it were not for my hidden but primary purpose – were I in reality only the new English mistress and not a detective as well, I thought – I should be at a pretty loose end by now and rather disappointed by my welcome. This thought brought another on its heels. What of Miss Glennie, who was not (presumably) sleuthing and skulking like me, but really had just joined the happy band of mistresses? What must she make of the utter lack of collegiate chumminess I had found here?

‘Here, little girl,’ I called out to a figure crossing the end of the passageway. To my astonishment, instead of meekly trotting up to see what I wanted, she put on a spurt of speed and disappeared from sight. ‘Hey! Young lady!’ I shouted after her and marched to the corner to find her dragging herself back as though she had weights attached to her ankles.

‘Yes, Miss Gilver?’ she said.

‘That was very naughty of you,’ I scolded. ‘I’m half-inclined to hand out…’ My voice trailed off as I realised I did not know whether St Columba’s went in for demerits, detentions or the slipper. ‘Anyway, don’t do it again.’

‘You know what the girls are calling you, don’t you?’ said the child with blithe impertinence.

‘I do,’ I replied. ‘Goody Gilver, but I’m willing to relinquish the honour.’

‘Grabber,’ she said. ‘Grabber Gilver. Always collaring us and sending us on errands quite out of our way.’

‘Well, I’m only after information this time, you little scamp,’ I said, secretly quite pleased to have got a nickname already and one I did not make up for myself, not to mention one which made me sound so efficacious as a moderator of youthful indiscipline. I only hoped I was not noticeably beaming. ‘Where is Miss Beauclerc’s old room?’

‘Oh! All right then. It’s up those stairs at the end there and halfway along the land-side passage. Just beyond the horrible picture.’

‘Thank you, peculiar child,’ I said. ‘And run along.’

One could see what she meant, I thought, as I drew even with the painting, in which Ophelia floated rather smugly in what looked like a fishpond; a paean to suicide which surely had no place in a girls’ school. (Although if the artist had painted what a young woman really looked like once good and drowned, one would no more have hung the results on the wall.)

Passing by it, I stopped at Miss Glennie’s door, which still bore the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc, and knocked. There was a pause, a scuffle and then a reply.

‘Yes?’

I opened the door and leaned in with a friendly smile arranged on my face.

‘Miss Gilver, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘The other new girl. Just wondering how you’re getting on?’ Then my smile faltered a little. Miss Glennie was getting on, or so it would seem, a lot better than me. She had a pile of jotters on her table and a large dictionary with gold-edged pages open on the floor at her side, and it occurred to me that there might be all manner of things I should have been busy doing yesterday and today.

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Miss Glennie. She did not look fine. She looked as though she had recently had some dreadful shock and was still reeling.

‘Had you far to come?’ I asked her. ‘Shouldn’t you be resting today after your journey?

‘Only Edinburgh,’ she replied. ‘And I’d rather not fall behind.’

‘And you’re new at this schoolmistressing lark, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Miss Shanks said something about your having been a governess before?’

Miss Glennie looked less fine than ever on hearing me mention what I was still sure must be her fictitious royal past.

‘I told the Lambourne Agency only with great reluctance,’ she said, ‘and they promised not to divulge my personal affairs to anyone.’

Or rather, I thought drily, she had made up a silly story that she heartily wished would go away and stop following her around.

‘One would think you’d be proud of such a connection,’ I said, smiling, ‘hardly ashamed.’

‘We’re not supposed to talk about it,’ she said miserably. ‘That was always made very clear.’ I nodded but said nothing. Teddy had been a one for tall tales set about by secrets when he was a child (a Foreign Office appointment requiring him to spy on the Germans with a secret radio he was not allowed to show us; this was one notable episode from wartime) but he had been six and Miss Glennie was forty-five if a day. ‘And now, Miss Gilver, I really am grateful but I must get on with all of this. Do you know there’s a girl going up to Edinburgh to read French? But only if she passes her Higher Cert.’ I nodded, but now it occurred to me that I could not remember whether Miss Shanks had said one of the crop of scholars currently incubating in St Columba’s bosom was bound for a degree in English. Chemistry she had mentioned, and I rather thought geography and history were the others, but I had not been thinking of English then, during my interregnum as the French mistress. I took my leave and hurried away to Fleur’s classroom, thinking there would be some note of such a scholar in the papers there. It was only when I opened the door and entered that I remembered having summoned Sabbatina Aldo, who was waiting in a desk in the front row and stood politely on seeing me.

‘Miss Gilver?’ she said. ‘I’m… Betty. You wanted me?’ Her voice was a curious mixture: the village Scotch of her early youth overlaid by a smattering of the Queen’s English, no doubt copied from her new school friends and her mistresses in admiration or to allay the teasing which must have come her way, and somewhere in there too was a trace – just a trace – of her Italian roots, in a kind of emphatic landing on the consonants and a slight reluctance to leave them behind.

‘Yes indeed, Betty,’ I said. ‘You don’t mind ‘Betty’? Sabbatina is a beautiful name.’

‘Sabbatina is a beautiful name for a Sabbatina,’ she replied, and her voice was pure Italian as she repeated the melodious word. ‘I am a Betty, though. You can have no idea, Miss Gilver, what a trial it is to have a name so at odds with your life.’

‘My Christian name is Dandelion,’ I said and was gratified to see a spark jump up and dance in her eyes. ‘You have my permission to chortle.’ Good child that she was, she only gave a very small smile before composing herself again.

‘Now, Sabbatina,’ I went on. ‘You know that Miss Lipscott is gone, don’t you? And I am the new English mistress?’ She nodded. I hesitated. All of a sudden I could not quite remember why I had thought I should speak to this girl at all. Or rather I had imagined a casual conversation somewhere, not this stark interview in an empty room.

‘I met your father,’ I said. Sabbatina gazed back at me very blankly. ‘I should like to be able to give him a good report of you. Tell him you are well and happy. I know you missed your visit home to see your parents yesterday.’ She was still gazing but her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

‘To see my father,’ she said. ‘Not to see my mother. Not yesterday.’

I had thought her father meant to hide the news from her but clearly he had changed his mind and although she was too polite to wail about her private woes to a perfect stranger her misery was palpable.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Just sad,’ said Sabbatina. ‘And a little confused. I don’t understand what is happening. I don’t understand how she could just go away.’

‘It’s a very odd world, the world of grown-ups,’ I said. ‘They often do inexplicable things and don’t usually stop to wonder how it looks to the innocent around them.’ I shut my mouth rather firmly at the end of this speech, having been mildly surprised to hear it coming out of me. Thankfully, she appeared to take it as yet another of the odd things that grown-ups do and not as the rebuke of her mother it most impertinently was. Besides, her loyalty was severely shaken. She looked fiercely angry as she looked at me and spoke again.

‘She was supposed always to be there. She said so.’

I nodded, dumb with pity for her, and could not think of a single platitude to serve up, for what woman in a thousand could leave her child? I am not the most maternal woman ever born, and often shut the numerous doors between drawing room and nursery, leaving Nanny to deal with the wailing. Frequently, too, I wilted with boredom listening to their stories and watching them at play (not to mention the fact that I faced the dreary prospect of Donald’s uncertain future with all the enthusiasm one usually takes to the dentist) but even I could not imagine just cutting loose and letting them tell their stories to the empty air, letting them listen to silence instead of adoring ‘good shows!’ when they scored a point or cleared a fence. And whatever hash Donald was going to make of his life without masters and prefects to keep him in line, I was determined to be there as a witness to it and, with luck, a hand on the tiller.

For the first time it occurred to me to wonder if her father’s early death – the Major had died without ever seeing his youngest child – could be at all to blame for the odd way that Fleur had turned out compared with the other two. Then I dismissed this as the tosh it had to be, for had not the two elder sisters lost their father to the grouse and the deer long before his death anyway, and had not little girls – and little boys, too – grown up without their soldier fathers throughout the whole of history? Mothers were quite a different thing.

‘I knew Miss Lipscott as a child, you know?’ I said to Sabbatina. This seemed to pique more interest in her than any of my previous offerings; or perhaps she was merely being polite to this odd newcomer who spoke of personal matters in such a way. ‘And it has been strange to me to meet her again as a grown woman, so much changed.’ Sabbatina nodded. ‘Of course, I only met her – this time around – on Friday, and I can’t tell for sure but I think perhaps she was not herself?’ Poor Sabbatina looked struck with terror at the thought of having to answer such an outlandish remark from a schoolmistress about another. ‘Did you see much of her?’

‘Of course,’ said Sabbatina. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just before she left, specifically?’ I added. Sabbatina was staring at me and I had to think very quickly. ‘When I told her sisters she had disappeared they wanted very much to know all that they could of her last days here. To hear all about her that could be told.’

‘Her last days?’ said Sabbatina, drawing back. ‘You make it sound as though she’s… dead.’ This was true and had not occurred to me until I ran over the words again in my mind. I changed the subject swiftly.

‘So, what can I tell your father if I see him, Sabbatina? Are you keeping busy and doing all your schoolwork? Are you finding time for your hobbies? One can’t work all the time.’

‘Tell him I am very well,’ Sabbatina said. ‘Working hard and keeping up with my sewing. I’m stitching a bedspread, Miss Gilver. For my bottom drawer. My mother chose the material and I chose the pattern. I’ve been stitching it since I was twelve. If I go to university I will have to put it in a chest, in mothballs, but I still work on it a little every day.’

‘I think,’ I said to Alec later on the telephone – I had to use the one in Miss Shanks’s study and was listening strenuously for her dreaded return – ‘I think she was offended at my insinuation that she wouldn’t mind sneaking. Or she was offended that I made the slightest, most heavily veiled hint about her family’s current misfortune. Anyway, she put me in my place.’

‘Did you insinuate?’ Alec said. ‘Did you hint? And why are you whispering?’

‘Just typical,’ I said. ‘The mistresses’ room has been deserted all day – forcing me to grill little girls for scraps of gossip – I probably did, you know: hint and insinuate – but now when I want to use the telephone they’re all in there playing cards and having a whale of a time, so I’ve had to sneak into the head’s study and if she catches me I’ll be for it.’

‘You seem to be making it all very complicated,’ Alec said.

‘I don’t know who to ask or what to ask them or where to turn,’ I moaned down the line to him. ‘How did you get on?’

‘Oh, it was all very straightforward and out in the open,’ said Alec. ‘I found out from Joe who all Rosa’s customers were and went round them, asking if they had any clue where she might have gone. Did they know of anyone else who was missing, had they seen anyone suspicious hanging around; in short, I’ve started a bit of a panic that there is a lunatic at large snatching women and making off with them.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said. ‘Good work.’

‘And I stopped in at all the farms – well, both the farms – and all the cottages on the way to Dunskey Castle, and asked if anyone had seen or heard anything in the first half of the week.’

‘And?’

‘And was obliged to eat tea four times, one after the other. Not bad in the first farm – Portree – thin bread and butter and warm scones, but cottagers’ teas are meant for men who’re herding sheep and building dykes. Solid, don’t you know.’

‘But did you learn anything?’ I asked. ‘I could be obliged to ring off any minute, Alec. Stop wittering on.’

‘At the first of the two farms and at all of the cottages – nothing,’ said Alec. ‘Except how little apple and how much pie can make an apple pie for working men.’

‘And at the second of the two farms?’ I asked, suppressing a sigh. ‘I take it all of that was by way of an introduction.’

‘At the second of the two farms – Low Merrick – I was set upon by dogs.’

I snorted.

‘Serve you right,’ I said. ‘Barging into a farmyard. Some of these sheep farmers are absolute hermits, you know. You’re lucky it was one lot of dogs and four teas, not the other way around.’

‘But it wasn’t a hermitage,’ Alec said. ‘There’s a painted sign at the gate proclaiming bed and breakfast. Sea views and home-cooking. But when I marched up the drive and hallooed, someone – I saw her arm and hand quite clearly – opened a door and shooed out a pack of dogs to see me off.’

‘A pack of dogs,’ I repeated.

‘Three collies,’ Alec admitted, ‘but those mean little skinny ones, with teeth like ice picks. I had to vault a gate. No joke after the pie. And moments later a bobby turned up to arrest me.’

‘For what?’ I cried. ‘There’s no law of trespass in Scotland.’

‘Well, with hindsight, I suppose, a strange man – me – going about the quiet country lanes asking if there’s a strange man going about does become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whoever she was with the dogs at Low Merrick had rung the police too.’

‘Oh my God, Alec,’ I said. ‘What a pair we make!’

‘Thankfully, it was Constable Reid,’ Alec said. ‘He went back on duty at six. So, I wasn’t clapped in irons but I don’t feel covered with glory.’

‘You poor darling,’ I said, laughing.

‘This would be Mr Osborne, I take it,’ came Miss Shanks’s voice from the doorway. I had forgotten to listen and, laughing with Alec, had not heard her come in.

‘Headmistress!’ I said. ‘I apol-’

‘Oh, no need, no need,’ said Miss Shanks. She sat down in the supplicant’s chair in front of her desk as though unconcerned that I was sitting in her place behind it. ‘Maybe ask another time, but don’t be sorry. And what ails Mr Osborne that makes you pity him so?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. I was still dumbly hanging on to the earpiece and could hear Alec’s careful breathing while he listened to this odd exchange. ‘Just nonsense, really. We’re old friends and nonsense is our habit, I’m afraid to say. I shall be much more solemn in the classroom with the girls.’

‘Ocht away,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘The girls could do with a wee bit cheering up in the English classroom. Young Miss Lipscott was solemn enough for us all.’