The Burry Man’s Day

Chapter Fifteen

I made another attempt to convince Alec the next day as he, Bunty and I walked down to the Rosebery Hall where the parish registers were stored. We had cooked up a tale about him discovering that he had forebears from this area and wanting to squint through the parish books to see if he could find them and we were hoping that the clerk in charge would let us go through the things in peace and not ask a lot of questions and try to help us.

‘If he does, we can give up and go to Register House in Edinburgh,’ I said, ‘and be sure to pick a name that isn’t actually going to appear. Now, here, in the cold light of day, are my reasons for thinking this is it: one, Mrs Dudgeon knew quite a bit more than we can otherwise explain her knowing about registry office opening hours – or rather thought she did. Two, Mrs Dudgeon was beside herself about the police surgeon going through Robert’s things. Three, Mrs Dudgeon was frightened at the thought of having to produce a marriage certificate in order to register the death. These incontrovertible facts are all neatly handled by the solution that Dudgeon was off to get married that day.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘For one thing, Mrs Dudgeon was wrong about the office being shut on Monday. It was open. Two, she might have any number of other reasons for not wanting the police to go through her husband’s belongings; a natural reticence and desire for privacy would be enough. Three, you don’t know it was the marriage licence that was troubling her. You said you mentioned birth, marriage and passport. It could have been any of them.’

‘Well, I wasn’t really thinking when I said passport,’ I said. ‘I would doubt very much whether he had one. And it doesn’t really matter that she was wrong about the office shutting, does it? It’s the fact that she had an opinion on the matter at all that’s interesting.’

We had arrived at the town hall steps where three little boys playing marbles on the memorial garden to the side were easily persuaded to look after Bunty for a penny each.

‘Only don’t try to ride on her back,’ I said, not liking the way one of them was eyeing her up. His crestfallen look told me I had divined his intention correctly and I followed up my warning with a stern look before following Alec inside.

The records clerk was delighted to oblige us, happily lugging volumes of the old parish registers from some back premises and laying them reverently on the large table in the public consulting room.

‘We have them all here,’ he said. ‘Much better really when you think of the damp in those church vestries. Some of the earlier ones are terribly spotted and foxed as it is, the years they mouldered there. Much better safe here with me.’ There certainly was no chance of them growing damp now, I thought, unwinding my scarf and unbuttoning my cardigan even though they were only silk chiffon, for on this August morning the windows were clamped shut top and bottom and there was a roaring coal fire in the grate. The clerk himself seemed perfectly comfortable, though, in a suit and with a woollen jersey in lieu of a waistcoat. In fact his hand – slightly foxed and spotted itself – was cold when it brushed against mine. Alec shrugged off his own coat and loosened his tie as soon as the old man had left us.

‘Phewf!’ he said. ‘I hope this isn’t going to take too long, Dan. Where should we start? Any point looking at Friday?’

‘No, of course not,’ I told him. ‘If I’m right about what Dudgeon was up to, he certainly wouldn’t have done it here. He’d be away in Edinburgh somewhere where no one knew him. Now, I’d say he was about fifty, and let’s say he would have married at about twenty, after the end of his apprenticeship, but certainly in time to have had a son who was old enough to go off to the war, more’s the pity for them all. So let’s start in ’88 to be on the safe side.’

It was terribly slow going at first, partly because of the crabbed handwriting of the old parish minister and partly, in my case, because I kept being distracted by all the other entries. I found the death of several female de Cassilises – the records of the line dying out which led to Cad, Buttercup and hence me being here in the first place – and some of the names were highly diverting.

‘Pantaloupe?’ I said. ‘Can anyone possibly have called their baby girl Pantaloupe? Isn’t that a fruit of some exotic kind?’

‘Cantaloupe, you’re thinking of,’ said Alec. ‘And I rather think the child was Penelope. The loop of the f above is mixed up in it.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s good – they would have been bound to call her Panties at school, poor thing. Where are we now, darling?’

‘1895,’ said Alec. ‘And there they are. 17th April 1895. Robert George Dudgeon born 1st June 1873, Carpenter, 2 New Cottages, Cassilis, Dalmeny to Christina McLelland, spinster of this parish, born 8th May 1875, 17 Clark Place.’

‘Hmph,’ I said, staring at the entry. ‘Well, then. Bang goes my brilliant idea.’ I continued to turn the pages, searching the columns.

‘What now?’ said Alec.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just looking. There he is. 21st June 1899. Robert George Dudgeon.’

‘Doing what?’ said Alec, looking over my shoulder.

‘Being born,’ I said. ‘This is young Bobby.’ I sighed and shut the book, just as the clerk came back to check on our progress.

‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, surprised to see us sitting back from the table with the volumes before us closed.

‘Not today,’ said Alec. ‘But you’ve been most helpful.’

‘There is one thing,’ I said. I could hear barking and shrieks of laughter from outside and I knew I had better not leave Bunty much longer but I was still troubled.

The clerk was looking at me, eagerly helpful, with his hands pressed together.

‘You were open for business yesterday, weren’t you?’ I said.

He gave a tight little sigh, almost a tut, of irritation.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine where everyone is getting the idea that we weren’t. You’re the second person to ask, you know. Some foreign gentleman telephoned to the registrar himself and asked the same thing only days ago. I must make a sign for the window, but really I can’t see how it came to be in question.’

I suppose one must have an orderly mind to be a good registrar’s clerk and this wild rumour about odd days of holiday here and there was clearly upsetting him.

‘The notion was that you’d stay open on the bank holiday to give people a chance to conduct their business and then you’d close the week after so that you could have a day off yourself,’ I said. It did not go down at all well.

‘I?’ said the clerk. ‘I? I’ve never agitated for “bank holidays”. I can’t imagine where you would have heard that.’ He spoke as though I had accused him of joining the Workers’ Union as a marching member, and I had to struggle to keep my mouth from curling up at the corners. ‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘our business is not the kind that can be saved up for a holiday. What an idea!’

This made perfect sense, of course, and should have occurred to us earlier. We left him rather despondently and turned down towards the promenade to walk up and down and reconsider, while Bunty rushed at seagulls and chased after stray pieces of picnic litter left over from the weekend and the Fair.

‘We’re not getting anywhere very much, are we?’ I said, leaning against the sea wall and watching the waves lap the rocks below. ‘We still don’t know who X is, or why he was necessary, or how Dudgeon died if it wasn’t a heart attack. How I wish I’d asked Mrs Dudgeon about a flask, Alec.’

‘A flask?’

‘When Robert got back to the Rosebery Hall, you know. Whether he topped himself up with whisky.’

‘It would take more than a flask,’ said Alec. ‘I’m no drinker, but even I could down a hip flask and come to no harm. If we’re talking about enough to make the doctor believe that he’d been at it all day, we’d need to be looking at a bottle. A half-bottle at the very least. And don’t be too hard on yourself, Dan. It was only yesterday we cracked the puzzle of the burrs after all.’

‘But I know we’re missing something about the registry and the documents,’ I said. ‘I was sure we wouldn’t find that marriage entry.’

‘Well, there was no mistaking it,’ said Alec. ‘And it was right in the middle of the page, not even at the bottom where we could say it had been squeezed in by a master forger.’

‘I know you’re joking,’ I said. ‘But Mrs Dudgeon was out wandering in the night with a pen and ink, and we did ask ourselves what one could need to write that one couldn’t write in the comfort of one’s own bedroom.’

‘Are you suggesting that she tramped all the way down here, and broke into the registry to tamper with an entry?’ said Alec. ‘I agree the pen and ink need to be explained, but I don’t think that particular explanation is going to do the job.’

I was worrying at a piece of moss growing in the crack between two copestones on top of the wall, picking at it with the hard point at the tip of my glove where the seams met and then blowing the pieces away.

‘Grant will scold you,’ said Alec, mildly. I said nothing. ‘Oh, come on, Dandy,’ he went on. ‘Give it up. It’s not like you to hold on so obstinately to an idea just because it’s your own.’ I thought back to the newspapers of the evening before but forbore to mention them.

‘Let’s think about X instead,’ I said.

The sea breeze was beginning to make my eyes water and I turned my back on the view and leaned against the wall facing McIver’s Brae instead. A brewer’s cart had drawn up at the awkward corner by Brown’s Bar and the draymen, having thrown a stuffed sack to the ground, were expertly letting barrels fall on to it then bounce off towards the open hatch to the cellar. A sudden prickle ran down the back of my neck, more than could be explained by the wind ruffling my collar.

‘Joey Brown!’ I exclaimed. ‘Alec, remember what I told you about when Joey Brown gave the Burry Man his dram? That was before we knew about X and we believed that she was just being a ninny. But now, thinking about it now, I don’t think she was just spooked by the costume. I think she knew it wasn’t him.’

‘But if she noticed, wouldn’t lots of other people?’

‘No, darling. She was a close friend of the family. Her brother was the Dudgeon boy’s lifelong chum and she was practically their daughter-in-law. And add to that the fact that she was frozen with terror and so probably looking much more closely at him than anyone else – you know the way your eyes are drawn to sights that terrify you. I was there. I saw her look at his hands and then look into his eyes and then shriek.’

‘And then she told her father?’ said Alec. He looked just as excited as I felt. ‘And when Willie Brown came rushing out into the street with the glass of whisky it was to check the story out, or to see if he recognized who it was. Would that fit with how the scene played?’

I thought back to the curious little drama on the cobbles just along the road from where we now stood, and nodded.

‘Yes, and what’s more, I think that was why the Burry Man refused the glass and the proffered whisky was dashed to the ground. Shinie didn’t really want to give the “cup o’ kindness” to someone who had tricked him and X wasn’t about to take it from someone who wasn’t playing along. Oh, Shinie Brown and his whisky. It’s all very torrid and heaving with significance, isn’t it?’

‘How d’you mean?’ said Alec.

‘I mean the bottle of Royal Highlander for his son really, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Haven’t I told you about that? I thought it was touching at first – he keeps a bottle of special malt in case of his son’s miraculous return from the war – but now I’m beginning to find it a little strained, a little mawkish. There are things in life too solemn to be played out with whisky after all.’

‘Spoken like a true cocktail drinker,’ said Alec. ‘And there’s no such thing as Royal Highlander whisky, I’m sure.’

This was going a step too far.

‘I may not like the stuff, Alec, but I do pay attention to details when I’m on a case and I tell you I saw it with my own eyes. Royal Highlander whisky, with a picture of a regimental piper on the label.’

‘Are you sure you’re not thinking of porridge oats?’ said Alec, and then stepped smartly out of the way of my toe as I went to kick him.

‘Positive,’ I said. ‘Pat Rearden told me all about it that day in Brown’s Bar. Apparently it sits on the top shelf. Come on, I’ll show you while we quiz Miss Brown.’

It was just on eleven and since today was a working day there was only one pair of old men to be scandalized by my entering the pub. Not even that, because when they turned to look as the door opened I recognized one of them as a neighbour from the crowd at Craw’s Close on the night of the greasy pole.

‘Grand day,’ he said in greeting as we reached the bar and Alec rapped on the counter for service.

‘A grand day to be bringing yer wife into a public bar at eleven o’clock in the forenoon,’ said the other witheringly, which was a bit much since he was sitting there himself with a small glass of beer and an enormous whisky before him.

‘I’m not his wife,’ I said which, on reflection, was hardly helpful to my bid for respectability. My chum from Friday evening only laughed his wheezy laugh and told us to ‘never mind Sandy’.

‘Good morning, Miss Brown,’ I said as that young lady appeared in response to Alec’s knock.

‘Madam,’ said Joey Brown. ‘Sir. What can I get you?’

‘I’ll have a large whisky,’ said Alec. ‘And the same for you, Dandy?’

‘Is there any of the damson gin still on the go?’ I asked. Joey Brown shook her head with her eyes wide and staring and the two old men at the end of the bar broke off their conversation and craned to look at me. I could feel two spots of colour begin on my cheeks and start to spread out across my neck in blotches. Was it really so shocking?

‘Lemonade, then,’ I muttered.

‘Somebody’s settled intae the Ferry awfy quick,’ said the sour one of the old men half under his breath. Joey Brown poured some whisky for Alec and then reached a bottle of lemonade from under the counter, shook it violently and unstoppered it. I watched her as she poured it expertly into a glass, but I was aware of the tilt of Alec’s chin out of the corner of my eye as he looked up and along the row of bottles on the top shelf.

‘As I thought,’ he said softly, ‘no such thing.’ I sighed extravagantly and looked up for myself, ready to enjoy the moment when I pointed out to him that there it was in plain view all the time. Macallan, Glenmorangie, Glenfiddich, Jura, Highland Park… I could not see it.

‘Highland Park?’ I said doubtfully.

‘And the piper?’ asked Alec. He was right, the picture on the Highland Park bottle was the usual one of an anonymous glen done in garish daubs.

‘Miss Brown,’ I said, taking a sip of the lemonade, which was delicious; sweet-tart and very cold, ‘I hope you won’t mind my mentioning it, but your father and I and Mr Rearden were chatting the other day – and then I happened to tell Mr Osborne here – about the bottle of Royal Highlander.’

There was a sucking in of breath from one or both of the worthies at the end of the bar, and I supposed it was rather clod-hopping of me simply to launch in like that. Joey Brown said nothing but only stared at me with her customary terrified rabbit stare. One wondered how such a nervous, flustered type ever coped when the men were three deep at the counter and baying in slurred voices. (I remembered that when I had passed on Ferry Fair’s Eve she had coped by turning her back on the crowds and cleaning behind the bar.)

‘Your brother’s whisky?’ I said, trying to speak as gently as I could. ‘The special bottle your father keeps for your brother? Only I can’t see it now. Was it drunk? Please don’t tell me someone stole it – I understand it was rather a special one. I do hope no one was so disrespectful as to…’

Joey Brown had been blinking faster and faster and rocking on her heels as I spoke, and at this point she broke away and fled into the back shop bumping hard off the door lintel and stumbling. I bit my lip and looked at Alec, horrified. The two old-timers were looking most uncomfortable.

‘Ye’re right enough, though, missus,’ said the friendly one, after an awkward pause. ‘Take a look, Sandy. It’s away again.’

Sandy screwed up his face and squinted at the top shelf, then nodded.

‘Ye’re right,’ he said. ‘It used to sit in the middle there between the… Och, but they’re a’ jumbled up from Joey cleanin’.’

‘Aye well,’ said his friend. ‘It’s for the best, doubtless, don’t you think?’

‘I do indeed,’ I said to him. ‘Although one can hardly imagine how much it must hurt his father to give up after all this time.’

‘He tried before, ye ken,’ said Sandy. ‘Took the bottle away without a word. This was years back. Four or five years now.’

‘Four, it’ll be, Sandy,’ said the other. ‘I mind it was just about a year after the end o’ it all. The bottle was gone and then it was back again. Mebbes this time, though, eh?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Alec. ‘Although Miss Joey still seems considerably upset.’ There was still neither sight nor sound of Joey Brown returning.

‘I’d better go after her,’ I said. ‘Since it was me who put my foot in it. I can’t just leave her to weep.’

Alec gave me a shrewd look and I knew what he was thinking. Part of me wanted to comfort Joey, it was true, but there was another part of me which knew if I comforted her into a proper lull I could then ask some questions with a hope of a plain answer. Hardly something to be proud of but there it was. Alec lifted the wooden flap of the bar and I stepped behind and through the doorway to the passage.

There was no sign of the girl in the back kitchen or in the passageway where I threaded my way along beside crates of empties and boxes tied shut with twine, but a door at the end was ajar. I knocked softly and pushed it open a little more.

‘Miss Brown?’ I called. There was no answer. I was at the head of a set of stairs leading down and although the steps themselves were in darkness there was a suggestion of a light on somewhere below. I began to feel my way down carefully. Five days at Cassilis Castle had fitted me well to tackle strange stairways in the dark and these were wooden and straight; I reached the bottom without mishap and set off towards the light, passing various dungeons where barrels rested and pipes gurgled. I knocked again on the door with the light behind it and then went in.

It was a large, square cellar with a door open to the back yard. Shinie Brown was in there, standing in the middle of the floor with a polishing cloth in one hand and an empty bottle in the other looking between me and the corner of the room, frozen in astonishment. I followed his gaze and there sat Joey huddled on a brick ledge in the wall, half-hidden by the wash copper, as though trying to stay warm.

‘I’m so sorry to be barging about like this,’ I said, dividing the apology between the father and daughter, ‘but I’ve upset you, Miss Brown, and I wanted to come to apologize.’

‘I broke it,’ said Joey Brown. It took me a couple of minutes to understand her meaning.

‘I broke it when I was cleaning, Burry Man’s night,’ she said. She threw a terrified glance towards her father as she said this, and I looked too, hoping that he was not going to fly into a rage with her and force me to leap in to her defence. He was still staring at me, however, an amused glint beginning to mingle with the amazement in his eyes. Eventually he turned towards the girl and spoke.

‘That’s right, lass,’ he said. He went over towards Joey and drew her away from the corner, tidying up as he did so, shifting the lid of the copper into place and tucking the hose pipes in neatly underneath it out of the way. If Joey was halfway through a wash she seemed to have forgotten it, and she followed her father meekly out into the centre of the room.

‘It’s time to put that behind us,’ he said. ‘I could never have taken it doon myself and got rid o’ it, madam, but when Joey here said tae me she’d broke it, I found I wisnae angered nor sad, I was jist relieved. It’s time tae put a’ that ahint us.’

Joey Brown seemed to take no comfort from any of this, however, but searched her father’s face as though he spoke in some code she could not decipher.

‘I’ll take you back upstairs,’ I said. I was sure being down here among the fumes of this noxious chamber could not be good for her, upset as she was. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Brown,’ I said. ‘I can see you’re busy.’

Shinie Brown shrugged with a gesture of great magnanimity and again the look of amusement danced in his eyes. I could see that I must be a ridiculous figure to him, bumbling around, no sense at all of how to behave, and I was glad to draw Joey Brown’s arm into mine and lead her away.

‘I found out about Bobby Dudgeon and you,’ I told her as we mounted the dark stairs again, ‘since we spoke last, and I wanted to say how sorry I was. I understand now why you were so very upset at Mr Dudgeon’s death.’ We edged our way back along the passageway and into the kitchen, where Joey Brown turned to face me.

‘I don’t know what you mean, madam,’ she said.

‘I mean I know you were engaged,’ I said, thinking how very childlike she seemed with her blanket denials, like a toddler standing over the bits of a broken vase insisting she never touched it.

‘I never said that,’ she whispered, glancing back the way we had come as though frightened her father would hear.

‘Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters told me,’ I said to her. ‘I know it wasn’t universally welcomed. I’m so sorry.’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about, madam,’ said Joey, the toddler and the broken vase going strong.

‘But you’ve obviously been a great comfort to his parents,’ I said. ‘And now to his mother alone. You’ve been a good girl.’

‘I don’t… I don’t…’ said Joey, but her voice quavered and failed.

I hated myself for it, but we were right here, just the two of us, face to face, and I might never get another chance to ask. Alec and I were getting nowhere with the case, I thought, and surely if someone was in a position to help I had to swallow my scruples and plunge in.

‘I know you must have spent some considerable time with the Dudgeons, Joey,’ I said. ‘Long enough to know that it wasn’t Robert Dudgeon in the burry suit on Friday, when you looked at his hands, was it? Or when you looked into his eyes?’

She was shaking her head, quickly enough to make herself dizzy I thought, and I put out a hand to try to calm her.

‘Inspector Cruickshank knows,’ I said. ‘But he doesn’t know who it was in there or why they swapped.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Joey.

‘So if you recognized who it was as well as who it wasn’t,’ I said, ‘it’s your duty to tell the police.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said again and I gave up.

‘It’s absolutely infuriating,’ I said to Alec as we left the bar minutes later. ‘Just saying: I don’t know what you mean, I don’t understand, I don’t know who that is. I mean – I said, “Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters” and she said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Ridiculous girl. She didn’t quite have the gall to claim no knowledge of the Dudgeons themselves and she let a reference to Inspector Cruickshank go past without wondering aloud who he was, but apart from that it was a perfect festival of denial.’

‘It seems a remarkably effective strategy,’ said Alec. ‘It got rid of you.’

‘Hmph,’ I said, almost jollied out of my temper by his tone. ‘Well, I’m glad she has to live in a smelly pub and do her laundry in a beer cellar full of fumes. I’ve no patience with the girl, Alec, none.’

‘And does your impatience extend to going along to the police station and telling tales on her?’ asked Alec.

‘Absolutely it does,’ I said. ‘At least, I’ll ask whether they’ve got anywhere themselves with the identity of X, but if not then certainly I’ll tell them I think Joey Brown has an idea, and possibly Shinie Brown too. Or you tell them, Alec. After our experiences with the inspector I think perhaps the information would carry more weight coming from you. And I’ll wait outside and make daisy chains.’

It was just as well that he had teased me back into humour in this way and that we had elected to play by the inspector’s rules and let Alec do all the talking; if I had stood outside the police station boiling with impotent rage or if Alec had stood there fussing with his pipe while I went in to report or if we had both gone in and bearded the sergeant together, we might never have solved the case at all.

As it was, Alec entered the inner sanctum alone and I sat placidly outside on the wall, perusing the notice-boards. There was one official one with close-typed signs regarding licensing hours and motor car lights, names and telephone numbers and office hours for all the officials one could ever need in a long lifetime, notices regarding customs and excise, immigration and emigration, emergency procedures for fire, flood and power failure; all very dull. As well as this, though, there was another much more interesting noticeboard where the less official, more home-made signs could be found: a lost cat with a red collar and a bounty of two shillings on its head; a found headscarf ‘real silk, pattern of horseshoes, rather stained and mended’ which I doubted, after that description, anyone would have the courage to claim, real silk or no. There also were the new Fair notices, one proclaiming the grand total of the police station’s collection in aid of the Ferry Fair fund – £7 10s 3d – and a list of winners of the Fair events, including, I was proud to note, the name of Doreen Urquhart opposite the new high chair and the towel bale donated by the Co-operative Store Drapers.

Alec was taking his time and soon I had enjoyed all that there was to enjoy of the human side of the noticeboard and was back with the regulations and procedures. I noticed that the library hours seemed especially designed to prevent anyone from ever being able to borrow a book without taking a day off work or school to do so, and that the rules about how long a catch could stay harbour-side and in what kind of container at what times on what days seemed to be a signal to the fishermen to have a taxi waiting as they moored so that they could throw each fish into the back seat without its scales ever touching the ground.

And then I saw it.

Almost as soon as my eyes had registered what I was seeing, or my brain had heard what the voice in my head was reading, the door of the station opened and Alec was at my side.

‘What is it?’ he said. Goodness only knows what expression I must have had on my face.

‘Look,’ I said, putting a finger on the notice. He bent close to read the small and rather smudged black type.

‘“… will remain open on all bank holidays between the hours of ten o’clock and three, and on all local holidays between the hours of nine o’clock and five, and will close in lieu upon the following Monday except where…”’ He shifted my finger off the paper where it was hiding the print underneath, and said: ‘Passports.’

‘Passports,’ I said. ‘Edinburgh and Leith Emigration Agents. Passports, ticketing, travel documents prepared.’ My mind was racing, or not so much racing, nothing so linear as racing, more as though my thoughts were schoolchildren who had been inside all morning while the snow fell and were now released to gather it up, roll it together and throw it all around. ‘He was getting a passport. He was going to run away.’

‘From what?’ said Alec.

‘Or not run away,’ I corrected. ‘But he was going to leave. They both were, on the quiet, for some reason, and on Thursday afternoon Mrs Dudgeon saw this sign, read that the office was closed on Monday and – look here – it’s closed every Saturday and on Sunday, obviously, and so Friday – the Burry Man’s day – was the only chance.’

‘Why not Tuesday?’ said Alec. ‘Or some other day? And where were they going? And why?’

‘I have no idea why,’ I said. ‘But where, I think I can hazard a guess. At least there’s a possibility that also explains why a later day was no good. There was a ship leaving Leith on Tuesday bound for New Zealand. I read about it when we were going through the papers last night. He would need to get the passport before the ticket and the tickets were on sale on Friday. Alec, this must be right. Remember I said Chrissie Dudgeon was so very keyed up, looking at the clock, looking at the door and then suddenly she just seemed to relax for no reason? It was around ten o’clock last night and I’ll bet my eyes that she was sitting there watching the clock tick round to the moment of sailing, thinking about the plan and about how if she had the nerve she could still go, alone, if she dared. Then all of a sudden it was too late; she hadn’t gone. The chance had passed and it was almost like a relief to her. Terribly sad, but a relief.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Alec. ‘She couldn’t have got there in time without a magic carpet and she would have had to go through customs and everything.’

‘I didn’t mean literally,’ I said. ‘You can be very prosaic sometimes, darling. I meant that she sat there while the other path of her life was being bricked up – Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know I’m right. And it also explains why she was so worried about the police going through Robert’s things. She was frightened they would find the passport and the tickets and begin to wonder what was going on.’

‘As am I,’ said Alec. ‘What on earth would make them suddenly up sticks to New Zealand without telling anyone?’

‘Once again we come up against my conviction of the Dudgeons’ basic honesty. The only likely reasons in general don’t seem at all likely for them.’

‘No matter,’ said Alec. ‘We don’t have to offer a motive. We can check the facts with the greatest of ease.’

‘The passport office would never let us trawl through the records,’ I told him. ‘And aren’t these emigration agents a rather shady bunch? Oughtn’t we to hand it over to the police?’

‘Not the passport office, Dandy,’ said Alec and, seeing my puzzled glance, he rolled his eyes. ‘There really should be a basic training course,’ he said, ‘for all budding detectives. We can go to Leith to the shipping line and look at the passenger lists. Or rather look at the ticket-booking receipts. They won’t be on the passenger lists, of course, since they didn’t go. Some pair of lucky adventurers waiting on the quayside on the chance of a space will have got a windfall on Tuesday night, Dan.’

‘Just imagine,’ I said. ‘Imagine bundling up all one’s belongings and going to wait, not knowing whether one is off to the other side of the world for ever or whether one will be trailing the same bundle back through the dark streets to more of the same.’

‘Yes, said Alec. ‘Just imagine. But walk quickly while you’re at it, won’t you? And you drive, darling. I’ve never been to Leith.’

I had never been to Leith either, or at least as I pointed out to Alec not to the docks, but I knew where it was and I navigated us there safely along the coast roads through Cramond and Granton and Trinity, braking and surging around the narrow twists and doglegs of the village streets, weaving through crowds of herring wives and, as we drew near the port, rather wobbly sailors newly released on leave. I remembered the name of the shipping company from my daydreaming over the steerage notice in the library last night and we were helpfully directed to their offices by a nautical-looking chap standing on fairly steady legs on the corner of Great Junction Street, whose accent was so much gibberish to me but in which Alec recognized the music of Dorset and of home. We wasted a good few minutes while the two of them reminisced about ‘The Bay’, but at last Alec dragged himself away again.

‘I miss these old Dorset boys,’ he said. ‘And the sea. Perthshire is delightful, of course, but when one has been brought up in sound of the sea it is a wrench to leave it. It must have been something fairly cataclysmic, I imagine, to drag Chrissie and Robert Dudgeon so far from the many bosoms of their families.’

‘Although New Zealand is not short of sea at least,’ I pointed out. ‘On maps it looks as though the tide might wash right over it at the height of springs, although I daresay that’s scale. Number fifteen, you said? Here we are.’

Brunwick, Allanson, the shipping line, had offices which struck a balance between the sepulchral dignity of a private bank and the rather more rakish atmosphere of a merchantman’s bridge during a party. There were a good many clerks flitting about in shades of grey but the panelled rooms were festooned with outdated nautical equipment of a semi-decorative sort and a few rather salty characters could be seen here and there through open doors. Above everything a mixture of lemon wax and pipe smoke gave a spice to the air that no bank ever had.

The desk clerk could not have been more helpful, but it soon became apparent that we were asking the most awkward of questions possible, inquiring about the passengers on a ship which had only left port the day before; in fact, the staff of the office were still referring to the departure time in hours of the nautical clock and would not, we were informed, begin to use the calendar date until the following morning when twenty-four hours had passed and the ship itself had docked and de-docked from the next port of call which was Plymouth.

‘If you wanted to see the passenger lists from last year, now,’ said the clerk, gesturing behind him at a wall of bound volumes with dates stamped in gold on their spines, ‘or ten years ago or even fifty, that would be the work of a moment with the help of a strong lad to lift down the book for you. But yesterday?’ He blew out his breath in a tootling little tune and shook his head. ‘And you’re not asking in an official capacity?’

‘We’re not,’ I told him, ‘but depending on what we find, someone soon might be. It’s best to be honest,’ I said, turning to where I could see Alec squirming beside me; clearly thinking we should have played our cards a little closer to our chests than this, fearful that the clerk would shut like an oyster at the hint of trouble.

The man merely shrugged and scratched at his chin, however.

‘We’ve nothing to worry about here at Brunwick, Allanson,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much to do with agents, and it’s not like the old days when we were our own excise men and our own policemen too. I’ve been forty years with the firm, you know, madam, and it’s changed.’ He settled his elbows on his counter and seemed disposed to launch into a tale. Perhaps even a clerk picks up the habits of sailors after forty years. ‘It was like the Wild West in the old Queen’s day,’ he went on, ‘before these picture passports and all the regulations. Well, that was the war, was that. There had to be some kind of a clampdown for wartime. Then it never really changed back and I don’t suppose it ever will now. So it’s up to the passport office these days to verify identities and make sure that all’s in order. At the quayside, as long as they turn up with a ticket and passport and are sober enough to say their names and walk aboard, we check them off on our boarding list and wave them through.’

‘Well, we don’t think these particular passengers did turn up, sober or not,’ said Alec, ‘but they certainly got a passport and we would make a large bet with our own money that they bought tickets too. Steerage tickets. On Friday.’

‘Steerage?’ said the clerk. ‘On Friday?’ I suspected that he might ring to have us removed on finding out that our interest was in something so lowly as a steerage ticket, but I could not have been more wrong. ‘In that case… and if you only want to see the ticket receipts themselves… that does help a little. They’re in date order – roughly – until we can cross-check the final lists and then we keep them all until the year end and send them to the bindery. But if you know it’s Friday and you don’t mind looking yourselves…’

We assured him that we did not, and although he huffed a little more about the slight irregularity and had to talk himself into it, telling us (as if we did not know) that these were public documents after all and that we were doing no harm, then he muttered for a moment about the Empire and the war and asked himself what the point was of fighting it if we were not now able to live free lives under His Majesty and, eventually, he left to fetch them.

The current records might be what passed for an unholy mess in the clerk’s opinion – he said as much with a great many apologies as he returned – but when one has recently gone through two sacks of burdock seeds with a garnish of horse-dung a box file full of papers can hold no fears and they were, as he said, in roughly date order. I untied the tape holding the file shut and the side dropped down. The early-booked, first class and cabin class tickets on the bottom were stacked in a neat-edged pile but as we got nearer the top towards the last-minute steerage bookings the receipts took on the dishevelled and scraped-together look one could imagine of the passengers themselves. I wriggled a finger into the stack just where the neatness stopped and the crumple began and heaved the top lot out.

‘Last Tuesday,’ I said, reading off the bottom chit, and I began to flick through them until I had isolated the fat bundle for Friday. I halved these and pushed Alec’s portion towards him.

Starting at a steady pace, I worked through my bundle, distraction always threatening – it was of some interest to see how many single men, how many young couples, and how surprisingly many huge families of children had set out on this trip – but as I pondered them I became aware of Alec whipping through his pile, snapping each receipt off the top, no more than glancing at it, and smacking it face-down on the growing stack at his other side. Almost automatically, I began to speed up too; I knew what he was up to. He wanted to be the one who found the prize and, in case he did not have it in front of him, he was ripping through his portion planning to take what was left of mine too. Having two sons for whom small daily bouts of competition were as necessary and as much relished as their four square meals, I recognized this immediately, ludicrous as it might appear, and being only human myself I did feel a pang of irritation when he spoke up.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Robert George Dudgeon, Cassilis, South Queensferry One-way, steerage class, paid cash in full.’

‘And?’ I said.

‘And nothing,’ said Alec. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just him?’ I said. ‘No Mrs Dudgeon? Let me see that.’ I snatched the receipt from him and looked for myself.

‘Would she be mentioned separately if she was on his passport?’ said Alec.

‘Absolutely she would be,’ I said. ‘Look at this: Bernard Lessom, Mrs Lessom, and all the little Lessoms down to Margaret Ann 15th May 1923 – imagine setting off with a babe in arms. Alec, if Chrissie Dudgeon was ever planning to go her name would be here.’

We sat for a minute drilling looks at the scrap of paper as though it could possibly have more to tell us, then Alec spoke at last.

‘So he was going to leave her, then.’

‘And she murdered him?’ I said. ‘Impossible. And anyway, she was in on the whole thing. Driving the cart, hiding the burrs. She wouldn’t collaborate in her own abandonment.’

‘Well, perhaps the plan was that they were both going and he double-crossed her. She found out and she murdered him for that.’

‘I don’t like the way this murder keeps blinking on and off like a faulty lamp whenever it suits us,’ I said. ‘We’ve been very remiss about tracking down these loose ends, you know. If Robert didn’t drink enough whisky to explain his death, but he did drink some at least, and he took some poison such as the mushroom, which wouldn’t show up on a post-mortem examination… those are a great many things to assume.’

‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ said Alec. ‘We need to find out whether he downed a whole bottle in the changing room at the Rosebery Hall. If he didn’t then we know at least that there’s a case to answer.’

‘Unless it was a heart attack,’ I said, dispirited even though I knew it was wicked to be dispirited at the idea of a natural death instead of murder.

‘Which would be a monstrous coincidence,’ said Alec. ‘Now, who do we ask about the whisky?’

‘Pat Rearden, I suppose,’ I said. ‘He was there in the disrobing room at the end of the day. But I’d like to start by asking Mrs Dudgeon. I don’t expect she’ll tell us straight but I want to see her reaction to the question. Let’s go.’