The Burry Man’s Day

Chapter Four

Daisy, judicial tasks accomplished the evening before and desperate to escape the castle, where Cad still continued very sombre, was all enthusiasm the next morning at breakfast. This was taken in the Great Hall at the Great Table on the newly arrived Great Chairs, since amongst all the other matters they had neglected in their childlike embracing of castle life, Buttercup and Cadwallader did not seem to have thought of a breakfast room. It was not too bad just yet; for one thing we were all good friends and a powerful note of new plaster and varnish still hung around, but I could imagine that as time went by and the Great Hall became redolent of rich dinners and cigar smoke as all dining rooms do in the end it would become insupportable to trail in to breakfast to sit at the same table with all the same bores who had driven one off to early bed the evening before.

‘We must do our very best today, Freddy,’ said Cadwallader, through a huge, choking mouthful of sausage – he always loaded his fork as though pitching hay with a rainstorm threatening – ‘to strike the right note. We’ve got to keep things perky enough to stop the whole jamboree feeling like a funeral, but at the same time we should take care not to be…’

‘Unseemly in our merry-making?’ I suggested. Cad brandished his knife at me.

‘Exactly! We must respond to the mood of the crowd for one thing. We don’t want to seem more morose than these good people who had known him for years. Freddy, are you listening?’ Buttercup – patently not listening – nodded hastily and assumed a rapt expression. ‘But at the same time we must not for one minute look as though we’re careless of the fact that he died, in case some near relation or bosom pal happens to notice.’

I felt suddenly rather sorry for Cadwallader. He was in a ticklish kind of a spot and his attempts to plan a route through it only made it the more obvious how hopeless it was to have him swan in and fill the role he was filling. Hugh, I am sure, would have done more or less exactly what Cad was now outlining but he would have done it without a moment’s thought and certainly without a syllable being uttered.

‘At least by the end of today we should know what happened,’ Cadwallader continued. ‘I’ve asked Inspector Cruickshank and Dr Rennick to track me down at the Fair as soon as the autopsy’s over and tell me the results.’

Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Mightn’t that inject a bit of a note, Cad darling?’ she said. ‘Mightn’t that tip the scales just a shade towards ghoulish?’

Cadwallader’s eyes clouded with doubt, but I could not face any more strategizing and so I broke in, rather rudely, to ask Buttercup: ‘What happens when? And where is it all? Please tell me the babies are first, because I won’t enjoy a thing until I’ve got that horror out of the way.’

‘Oh, I’m declaring it open at ten, I think,’ said Buttercup. ‘I was going to ask you what I should say in my speech, Dan.’

‘Frederica, you’re not even trying!’ said Cadwallader, with the note of wounded exasperation I remembered hearing from mistresses and house matrons (for a while until they all gave up).

‘It’ll be fine, Cad darling, stop fussing,’ said Buttercup, and of course, because Daisy and I spent the next hour and a half fretting over the speech for her and making notes on little cards, it was. As she delivered it, tears were wiped but there was laughter too and when she had finished, the townspeople quite seemed to regard their coconut-shying and sack-racing as marks of respect for Robert Dudgeon, so purposefully did they make their ways to the various sideshows or the table where officials were taking entrants’ names. The fairmen started up their hurdy-gurdies, and a fiddler struck up a tune to which people immediately began to dance one of those terrifically complicated Scottish country dances.

By twelve a queue of children had begun to form at the town hall steps.

‘Such a good idea,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, the Provost’s wife. ‘They queue to get a ticket, and then they take their ticket all the way along to McIver’s Brae and queue again to get a bag of picnic goodies and a balloon so by the time they plump down on the grass to eat it they’re nicely calmed down and well exercised to boot.’

‘Do I detect Mr Turnbull’s hand?’ I said. ‘He seems very keen on lungfuls of good fresh air and the rest of it.’

‘Lord, no,’ said Mrs Meiklejohn, with a laugh. ‘Mr Turnbull might well have them chasing around the town to get their hands on their lunch bag, but he wouldn’t approve at all of what’s inside it. Mind you, Mrs Gilver, he’s doing marvellous things up at the school. Drafting in lecturers from a college in Edinburgh, was the latest I heard, and the children are taking to it like so many ducks to water. In fact our doctor’s wife – terribly set in her ways although a wonderful friend and neighbour really – told me almost in spite of herself that she thought Mr Turnbull’s techniques were showing results already.’

The gods were smiling upon us, for it was at this fortuitous juncture that Mr Turnbull himself appeared suddenly behind Mrs Meiklejohn, with a bashful grin. Had he been half a minute earlier, it might have been awkward.

‘Spare my blushes, Mrs Meiklejohn, please,’ he said in self-satisfied tones. Mrs Meiklejohn looked at me with dancing eyes but managed not to giggle. ‘I do my best.’

We said nothing, Mrs Meiklejohn and I, gave him no encouragement, but he was clearly one of those who did not need any.

‘If I can see to it that even one child of mine stays away from the bottling hall, out of the mines and off the fishing boats,’ he said, ‘I shall count myself a success. Horticulture, Mrs Gilver. Horticulture, agriculture, arboriculture and husbandry. There is good wholesome work on the land for as many as want it.’ He waited, preening, for some response.

‘I can see why the bottling hall mightn’t be to everyone’s taste,’ I said carefully, thinking that I for one could not spend a working day amongst whisky fumes without sickening. ‘And coal mining is filthy and dangerous work to be sure. But whatever is your objection to the fishing boats? I’d have thought bobbing around on the ocean wave…’

‘Shale mining,’ Mrs Meiklejohn corrected me mildly. ‘It’s shale mining round here, Mrs Gilver. Not so heavy but just as beset with -’ At this Mr Turnbull interrupted her.

‘Coal mining or shale mining, there’s very little difference in the essentials. It all encourages superstition and morbidity. And fishing is worse than either. Tall tales and talismans filling their heads with nonsense.’

‘Ah,’ I said, understanding him at last. ‘Certainly, yes. If one puts one’s life at risk every day one would naturally try to be lucky.’

‘There’s nothing natural about it,’ said Mr Turnbull.

‘And the problem with the bottling hall is…?’ I said, although I could easily guess.

‘The demon drink,’ Mr Turnbull confirmed. Beside me, Mrs Meiklejohn was breathing heavily, trying to control her laughter. ‘But I’ll save them, Mrs Gilver. The children will pass out of my sphere as bonny and pure as they enter yours today.’

‘My sphere?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘That’s what I came to tell you,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘Your infants await.’

‘Oh golly!’ I said and followed him. Ahead of us at the Bellstane I could see a gathering crowd of women, each with an armful of frilled and beribboned baby. Most of these seemed to be bawling and some of the women, dressed in black, looked so near tears themselves that one could not imagine why they had not withdrawn their entry.

‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun, Mr Turnbull, isn’t it?’ I said in an attempt to rally myself.

‘Not really,’ he said, showing no tact whatsoever, I thought. ‘There is the prize.’ He pointed towards a handsome wooden high chair, newly painted in a cheerful pale blue and with a motif of little ducklings across it. ‘Such good practical prizes,’ he went on, with immense satisfaction, nodding towards the town crier who had been parading around all the morning with a pair of boots hanging from the top of his staff.

‘I had been wondering about those boots,’ I said.

‘They’re the prize for the borough race,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘The race around the town boundary. A new pair of good boots is not to be sniffed at.’ I had never known a man like him for pushing wholesomeness down one’s throat until it made one choke and by this time I was ready to bet that Mr Turnbull had cold shower baths every day, he and his wife taking it in turns to pour buckets of water over each other in the garden and beat themselves with eucalyptus branches. I pictured this briefly. Perhaps not.

When we arrived at the Bellstane, what looked like a couple of hundred young women stood before us, industriously primping the curls and buffing the cheeks of babies ranging from a few months old – the lolling, useless stage – to bruising great beasts of almost two who tore at their bonnets and struggled to escape the restraining grasp. These were fearsome creatures, and I quickly decided that although I should have to show some enthusiasm for each of the brats, I was determined to make the final selection from amongst the smaller, gentler specimens. The winner, I was determined, was to be one which would not bite me as I held it up for its moment of glory.

I inquired about names and ages and trotted out a little snippet of praise or appreciation for each: ‘What a darling,’ ‘A fine strong boy,’ or, when confronted by a particularly nasty one, ‘Here’s a character, then!’ and it was easy enough to whittle out the absolutely hopeless, whose presence could only be explained by the blindness of mother-love. After that I was at a loss. I should have to shut my eyes and, so to speak, stick a pin in one, for no other option presented itself. Still, I was almost at the end of the line, my early estimate of two hundred having been panic-induced, of course: there were thirty. And only four to go. The next was quite a little one, wrapped in a gauzy shawl and held by a rather tired-looking woman in her forties.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, smiling sweetly towards the bundle. I had hit upon this phrasing after coming a cropper with the more obvious, when ‘What’s his name?’ had brought the answer ‘Susan’ and a scowl.

‘Doreen,’ said the woman, and opened the shawl a little. I peered in. Two shrewd, round blue eyes looked back at me from under a wisp of dark hair with just a glint of red in it. The baby could not have been more than six weeks old, still with the elfish look of the newborn, the look which I am sure is responsible for all those fairy tales about changelings. As her mother loosened the shawl further, a tiny fist sprang out and spread like a starfish in front of me. I bent closer and put my finger to her palm, expecting her to grasp it – my fingers had been grasped and sucked and even nibbled all along the line – but Doreen, looking past my face, sank her fingers deep into my fox fur. She was too tiny to chuckle, but she gave a small purr like a nursing cat and smiled faintly.

‘A taste for the finer things in life,’ I said to her mother, who gave a weary echo of the same faint smile, but said nothing. I had a cursory look at the rest of the creatures in the line, but my mind was made up.

‘The prize for the bonniest baby of all these very bonny babies,’ I said, ‘goes to little Doreen. Congratulations.’ Doreen’s mother beamed and nodded but all around were rumblings.

‘Wee Doreen Urquhart?’

‘She’s a poor wee scrap of a thing.’

‘She wouldnae make half of my Andrew here.’

Too late I remembered what Daisy had said about picking the fattest one or at least the one with the rosiest cheeks.

‘Yes,’ I went on, rather defensively. ‘Doreen Urquhart. There’s an enormous personality inside that little frame and, mark my words, she will grow up to be a great beauty.’ And I clapped my hands decisively, ignoring the glares.

This minor blunder of mine aside, the day seemed to be going off quite well. Cadwallader and Buttercup were circulating assiduously like a pair of diplomats at the very top of their game and from what I could tell they were managing to strike the right note. For one thing, Buttercup is such a darling close up, so chummy and unaffected, that people can’t help but take to her one-to-one; it is only when she is given a large arena that she causes affront. As for Cadwallader, he shied balls at coconuts with the best of them, but when he missed he gave a rueful shrug as though respect for the Dudgeons might have put him off his stroke. Similarly, Buttercup clapped and hurrahed at the races but handed over the prizes with a pat on the arm and a smiling sigh. The townspeople themselves, too, had that natural impulse to respect the dead which meant that some of the bawdy raucousness of the previous evening was missing; this even though the precise manner of respecting the dead in a Scottish village meant that any man sufficiently affected to be wearing a black tie and armband was likely to be quite seriously drunk.

So, it was not exactly decorous but it was far from the Bacchanalia that Mr Turnbull feared and I stuck it out for some considerable time. By two o’clock, however, Daisy and I began to wonder when we could decently make our way back to the motor car and retire for the day. I had purchased more cheap hatpins and sewing cases than I had housemaids to give them to, and Daisy wanted only to find a suitable small child to honour with the garish teddy bear she had won by lobbing coloured balls into goldfish bowls, and she too would be ready to go.

I craned around for Cad or Buttercup, preparing my excuses, but when I finally spotted the golden head – Cad’s real gold, not Buttercup’s April Sunrise – my heart rolled over. Inspector Cruickshank and a dapper little man I took to be Dr Rennick had drawn Cad aside in the doorway of a hairdresser’s shop under the terrace – shut up for Fair day – and the three were talking with bowed heads and solemn faces. Daisy and I made our way over.

‘Mrs Gilver, Mrs Esslemont,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Good news. Or rather as good news as possible under the circumstances. Death by natural causes and no need for an inquiry. We’ll be able to return Dudgeon’s body to Mrs Dudgeon this evening.’ Cadwallader’s expression was very hard to read.

‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

‘Heart failure,’ said the little doctor. There was something just slightly off about his manner. He held his head back and looked down his nose through his half-spectacles, rather ridiculously since even Daisy and I were taller than him by inches and Cad and the inspector positively loomed.

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘That’s agreed then.’

This was a very odd remark and to cover it, I supposed, Cruickshank began to direct Daisy and me in rather hectoring tones to go and find Buttercup and get ready to visit Mrs Dudgeon, and when this petered out he took to bidding the doctor an elaborate farewell. Dr Rennick, with one hard-ish look at us all, melted away into the crowd. Meanwhile, I continued to stare at Inspector Cruickshank who, to his credit, after watching Dr Rennick’s back for a moment or two, then looking around above my head and whistling, finally met my eye.

‘You are quite right, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, obviously too cryptically for Daisy who looked at him in surprise. Before speaking again, he ushered us all out of the cramped doorway and we began to walk along the crowded street looking for Buttercup.

‘A death certificate is a very serious matter,’ Cruickshank went on. ‘But do not be alarmed. Robert Dudgeon did die of heart failure. Only it was brought on by alcoholic poisoning.’

‘Poisoning?’ echoed Daisy, stopping in her tracks.

‘Alcoholic poisoning,’ said Inspector Cruickshank, putting a hand under her elbow to keep her moving, ‘is the medical term. In layman’s terms he drank too much and his heart gave out. At least a bottle of whisky as far as we can make out, never mind the beer, and only a wee ham sandwich to soak it up. Dr Rennick said he had never seen anything like it.’

‘How on earth do you know -’ began Daisy, then stopped and grimaced. ‘Oh, how revolting, Inspector really.’

‘And the death certificate will show…?’ I said.

‘Heart failure following on excessive consumption of alcoholic liquor,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘We need to be scrupulous as far as the certificate goes. But let’s call it heart failure plain and simple when we speak of it. I’m a great believer in taking care of the living and letting the good Lord take care of the dead.’ A surprising statement to come from a policeman, I thought, unblinking zeal in the pursuit of justice being rather more usual.

‘Well, I guess,’ said Cadwallader, as though rolling some idea around in his head.

‘Look around you,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Look at them all in their blacks and their armbands. Dudgeon was their friend and you can be sure near every one of them gave the Burry Man a nip yesterday. What good would it do to go using a word like poisoning and make them think they had killed him?’

I glanced around at the villagers, and felt myself beginning to agree.

‘And,’ he went on, ‘it would awaken some very unwelcome ghosts.’ I saw Daisy rolling her eyes, but when she spoke her tone was quite polite.

‘Ghosts, Inspector?’

‘Figurative ghosts,’ he assured her. ‘There was a case here before, of what might have been alcoholic poisoning. And we never got to the bottom of it.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Recently?’

‘Oh no, years ago,’ said the inspector. ‘Must have been four or five years ago now. Four more like; I remember it was about a year after the end of the war. Two young… gentlemen, I suppose you’d call them. Came on a sketching holiday and ended up dead.’ His voice was hard. ‘They went on a drinking spree along the High Street and once they were in their cups they let it slip that the pair of them had been conshies. The next morning they were found, face down and dead, down the lane behind the Sealscraig.’

‘Poisoned?’ asked Buttercup.

‘Hard to say,’ said the inspector. ‘Could have been. They were certainly well pickled. Or they could have passed out and died of hypothermia, lying out all night.’

‘Two of them, though?’ I asked.

‘That was the trouble,’ said the inspector. ‘Two young men in good health. The other possibility was that they were deliberately intoxicated then taken away and laid so that they’d smother in their sleep. As I say, we never got to the bottom of it and it made for a very troubled air about the place until we finally let it be. I’ve no wish to bring it all back to folk.’

I held no brief for conscientious objectors, and I did not want to dwell on the tale but, about the current instance, something still troubled me.

‘Inspector,’ I said, ‘if you did say it was poisoning, although it would be horrid for everyone, at least it would stop the same thing happening again. I mean, I’m as loath as the next to give fodder to the Temperance gang, but in this case, just this once, don’t they rather have a point?’

Inspector Cruickshank’s face twisted up into a wry grin.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘They don’t wait for ammunition. They’ll have started already. Go to the church tomorrow morning if you don’t believe me.’ At that moment we passed a pair of bobbies and Cruickshank, unable to resist the chance to inspect a couple of his troops unannounced, raised his hat to us and marched towards them.

‘So that’s that,’ said Cadwallader. ‘Now, where the hell is Freddy?’

We mounted the steps to the terrace above us to scour the crowd for her and stood watching the three quite separate occasions which seemed to be taking place all at once in the street below. Children were perched on every wall, windowsill and kerbstone, licking at toffee apples and ices, or were jostling at the stalls and plucking at their mothers for more pennies, intent on winning or wheedling another sticky treat while the going was good. The women more or less ignored the stalls and sideshows, choosing instead to stand around in laughing, chattering groups, seeming not to look at the children at all until a bark of reproach or a swift cuff to a passing ear gave the lie to it. In the same way, they seemed not to be looking at one another, but I was sure that each new dress or old hat was being studied and would be discussed amongst little knots of particular friends later on, just as I was sure that Daisy and Buttercup would be ready to share with me their thoughts on Mrs Turnbull’s terrible shoes and Mrs Meiklejohn’s surprisingly good pearls. Finally, the men. Perhaps we had chosen an unfortunate spot as our vantage point, slap between the Stag’s Head and the Queensferry Arms, but it seemed that all around working men, well-scrubbed for the day, with scraped cheeks and slicked-down hair were staggering into pubs, staggering out again, blundering along the street towards the Forth Bridge Saloon or, if they stood in gossiping groups of their own, waving like ears of wheat in a breeze and taking the occasional sudden step to the side when their balance threatened to leave them altogether. Three scenes then: the children out of Hogarth, the women from Brueghel, and the men, I fear, straight from an illustration in a Temperance pamphlet. All that was missing was Buttercup.

At last, I spied a head of bright curls disappearing around the bend towards the Hopetoun Road.

‘There she is,’ I said.

‘She’s going the wrong way,’ said Daisy with a querulous note like a tired child and Cadwallader too looked at his pocket watch and threatened to glower.

‘I’ll catch her and you two go ahead,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet up at home.’

With that, I plunged into the crowds again and began dodging in and out, threading my way towards my object, now and then catching just a glimpse of the glinting head. It really was the most peculiar colour. At last, after a determined effort – she was covering the ground at some speed – I called out and reached for her arm, but instead of the handful of silk georgette sleeve I had been expecting, my fingers closed on rough cotton, slightly sticky, and the head turned to reveal the face, shadowy under the eyes and blotchy with tears, of Joey Brown the barmaid.

My first thought, I am heartily ashamed to say, was that I should take great delight in telling Buttercup of my mistake in the hope of stamping out the April Sunrise for ever. Following hard upon this, though, came the proper recognition of what stood before me.

‘My dear,’ I said, ‘whatever is the matter?’

Miss Brown took her trembling lip between her teeth, and shook her head wordlessly, while tears continued to fall.

‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘Sit and tell me what’s happened.’ I drew her down on to a low wall, but she only gulped and hung her head. ‘Or is there anyone I can fetch?’ I said, getting desperate. She shook her head vehemently, curls bobbing. ‘I say, I hope no one has hurt you?’ I went on, this idea only just occurring. ‘If one of these young men has made a beast of himself, Inspector Cruickshank and two of his men are just around the corner and -’

‘No!’ said Miss Brown at last, looking up wildly. ‘Thank you, madam, it’s nothing like that. It’s just… My father wants me to go and see her and… I just can’t. I can’t go there.’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where can’t you go?’

She did not answer, but only continued to weep. I had been patting her arm absent-mindedly, but only at this point did it occur to me that the cotton sleeve I was patting, which had registered as sticky in the first instant, was sticky with new dye, and that more of this dye, obviously hastily and clumsily applied, had rubbed off on Joey Brown’s neck. Of course, mourning.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Mr Dudgeon.’

Miss Brown sobbed, one hand over her mouth and the other pressed so hard against her eyes that it must be painful. I took her hands gently and drew them away, giving her a handkerchief, the thought flashing across my mind that I hoped Grant had packed plenty since this was the second I had relinquished since the same time yesterday.

‘And now my father wants me to go and see her.’

‘Well, that would be kind,’ I said. ‘But if you can’t face it no one will think the worse of you. You’re not a relation, are you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’ And for some reason this made her howl more than ever. ‘I can’t go there, because it’s – it’s – all my fault. And I was just being silly and now he’s dead.’ This was delivered in a tiny whisper, hoarse with tears.

‘How on earth can you think it’s your fault?’ I said.

‘I was supposed to give him his dram and if only I hadn’t looked in his face or if only I hadn’t dropped it. If only I’d been braver. If only I’d known.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ I said, putting an arm around her. ‘Oh, you silly girl. You must put this nonsense out of your pretty head at once. Why, you of all people are one of the few who shouldn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt, because you -’ I stopped myself. It had been decided by those with far more say in the matter than me that this should not be touched on.

‘Because I what?’ said Joey, looking up at last. ‘Why me of all people? What do you mean?’ She looked wary and rather scared. I stared at her, spitting with exasperation that I could not tell her that if only more of Dudgeon’s so-called friends had dropped the glass and run away he would be still walking around.

‘Nothing,’ I said at last. ‘Only one can’t bear to see a pretty young face spoiled by tears, and one can’t bear to see a bright young head full of nonsense. You did nothing to harm Mr Dudgeon, and you know it. Your father should have known better than to play such a trick. Tell him that from me.’

Miss Brown drew herself up, and wiped her eyes.

‘My father did no wrong, madam. I don’t know what you mean.’ She blew her nose and stood up and I must say it is a bit much to be cut dead by a slip of a girl while she blows her nose quite so lavishly into one’s own handkerchief. Still, I was glad of this natural end to our tête-à-tête.

‘Chin up, Miss Brown,’ I said magnanimously.

‘Thank you,’ she said, rather more gently. ‘Now, if you’ll pardon me, madam, I must get back to the bar. This is a very busy day.’ She set off in the direction she had come, whatever mission she had been on abandoned.

‘At last!’ Mrs Dudgeon half rose out of her seat as Buttercup and I entered her living room an hour later. The cottage was beset by the women we had passed the day before who sailed around her in that self-important kerfuffle which always ensues when there are more bodies desperate to help than there is help needed, but I had no great opinion of any of them as handmaidens for her grieving: if anything she seemed even more agitated than she had the previous evening, trembling and anxious, barely making sense when she spoke.

‘Have they finished with him? I don’t know where I had put my wits last night. I wasn’t even thinking. And they’ve kept him all this time and all his things.’

‘They have finished,’ said Buttercup, ‘That’s what we came to tell you. He will be brought home to you tonight. A Mr Faichen?’

‘The undertaker,’ put in one of the women.

‘Yes, Mr Faichen will be bringing Mr Dudgeon home very shortly.’

‘And all his things?’ said Mrs Dudgeon.

‘Of course,’ I said. I assumed I was correct. Why would these things – whatever it was she was so anxious to regain – be kept away from her?

‘Good.’ Mrs Dudgeon sat back for less than a heartbeat it seemed before she pressed forward again. ‘I need… I want to have him here with me. And his things. I cannot bear to think of them going through his things. Did they, do you know, madam? Did they go through all his things? What did they find?’ All of this was on a rising scale which brought an answering murmur of soothing noises from her companions.

‘What did they find among his things?’ echoed Buttercup wonderingly.

Mrs Dudgeon gazed blankly at her for a second and then spoke hurriedly.

‘No – I – What I mean is, what did they find when they did the… What did the doctor…’

‘Heart failure,’ said Buttercup.

Mrs Dudgeon sank back into her chair.

‘Heart failure,’ she repeated, but even as she said it her eyes began to flit back and forward as though she was thinking furiously, and presently she added:

‘So they’re not going to do a post-mortem after all? There won’t be any…’ Again a rushing chorus like wind in trees began as the women tried to drown out such a bald reference to the very worst of it all.

‘They’ve done everything necessary,’ I said. ‘And heart failure is what it told them. The doctor thinks it was probably down to… I mean, it didn’t help that he had had rather a lot of whisky.’

‘But he hadn’t,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. Her companions drew in a collective breath. ‘I mean… he’d had a few drams but he wasn’t fu’. I grant you he’d had a few nips, but he wasn’t fu’.’

‘These doctors,’ said Buttercup. ‘They would have us all on milk and water if they had their way. Of course he wasn’t. I mean, he was the Burry Man for twenty years and more and the nips of whisky are as much a part of the day as the burrs and the flowers, aren’t they?’

Mrs Dudgeon did not answer this although it seemed to mollify her. She chewed her lip for a moment, still casting quick glances from side to side, and then finally she raised her head and addressed me apprehensively.

‘Will there be an inquiry?’

When I shook my head I saw in her face a strange mingling of expressions, growing puzzlement and something else too. She could not, quite clearly, ask whatever it was she wanted to ask, and that in some way left her helpless. I looked back at her, just as helpless, longing to ask her what was wrong, what else could possibly be so wrong as to supersede something as enormous and immediate as her husband’s sudden death.

And did she really believe he had hardly drunk a drop all day? It was possible: people do manage to maintain such delusions. I have an aunt as wide as she is tall, fingers like sausages and calves like hams, who tells me with round-eyed sincerity, all chins a-waggle, that she lives off thin soup and grilled cutlets, actually tells me this while dipping her spoon in and out of the quivering mound of trifle with which she is cleansing her palate after the boeuf en croute.

Perhaps Mrs Dudgeon was not as bad as this; perhaps she knew exactly how drunk Robert Dudgeon had been and was feeling guilt that she had not prevented it with some application of wifely skill: nagging or huge helpings of milk and potatoes, but it was not guilt, that expression upon her face, nor anything like guilt. I tried to pin it down but my attention was distracted by one of the handmaidens proffering tea. The rest of them watched me almost greedily as I drank, but only for a moment did I wonder why. No fewer than three, leaning against the sideboard in a row like waitresses in a lull, had cloths in their hands and they were waiting to pounce on our used cups, desperate for even such a scrap as that to make them feel busy and helpful. Out of kindness I accepted a biscuit and a plate to put it upon, and made sure to scatter plenty of crumbs. How it must have thwarted them that the grim woman of the night before had done so much of the available housework before they got there.

‘No inquiry,’ said Mrs Dudgeon, just as I finished my tea and relinquished the cup and as I did so and heard her words, I remembered something and at the same time I suddenly recognized the expression on her face, but before I could put a name to either the memory or the look they cancelled each other out and the moment was gone, quite gone, like a sneeze unsneezed, or like a gun half-cocked and unfired while the pheasant flaps off into the dusk, screeching.

‘So that’s that,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. She gazed about her as she had the day before, at the chair opposite, at the picture on the mantelpiece, and she spoke with great calmness, into the silence of the room. ‘That’s the end of it, then. That’s that.’

‘That’s that?’ echoed Cadwallader, later. ‘She said, “That’s that”?’ Buttercup and I had joined him and Daisy in the library whereupon he had poured me a monstrously huge drink and demanded to be told all.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t the way it sounds now,’ I said. ‘Was it, darling?’

Buttercup only blinked.

‘It was as though she were saying, I had a husband yesterday and today he’s gone and there’s no reason for it and no one to blame and that’s that. Actually, I rather thought it was her son and her husband, you know. She did glance towards the son’s picture as she said it. She had them both and she lost them both and there’s the end of it and she’s on her own now. It was terribly sad and it makes perfect sense.’

‘It does?’ said Cad with a sly look at Daisy which I could not begin to interpret. He waited, Daisy waited, Buttercup stared into space and sipped her cocktail.

‘And yet,’ I said, almost reluctantly. I was tired, drained from all the giving of sympathy, not to mention the bonny babies. ‘And yet… there was something.’

‘Mrs Dudgeon said something?’ asked Daisy.

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘She looked… Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Once before in my experience someone at a comparable moment behaved not as I thought she would and in that case it turned out that all was far from well. So I suppose I’m just looking for trouble and, therefore, as my nanny warned me, finding it. Ignore me.’

‘So this feeling you had,’ said Cadwallader, ‘it was just a funny look from the widow, was it? Nothing else?’ I stared at him and at Daisy too, puzzled, with a growing feeling that something was going on here I could not quite catch on to.

‘What are you two up to?’ I said. Cad gave back a limpid gaze, but Daisy fidgeted and would not meet my eyes. She has a dreadful habit, started goodness knows where and when, of sticking her cocktail stick, once the olive has gone, into the setting of her engagement ring, then snapping it off and sticking in the next bit, and so on and so on until her beautiful cluster of five diamonds looks like a dried porcupine. I have seen her go through an evening like this, little ragged bits of cocktail stick poking out from her finger, and I assume that her maid removes them at bedtime. Grant, I am sure, would smack my legs and put my ring in the bank if I did the like.

‘One of these days, one of those stones will ping right out, darling,’ I said. ‘And if it goes in the fire, I shall laugh.’

Daisy raised her eyebrows in that haughty way of hers (I am immune to it) and said: ‘Don’t take it out on me, Dan. Just give in.’

‘Give in to what?’ I said.

‘I knew it,’ said Cad. ‘Although you wouldn’t listen. I knew it this morning. Robert Dudgeon knew it last night. And what you’ve said convinces me that Mrs Dudgeon knows it too. Now, if an autopsy had come up with something solid I was prepared to believe I was wrong but…’

‘Not this again,’ I said, almost, almost laughing. ‘Robert Dudgeon died of heart failure owing to alcoholic poisoning. How can you doubt it? How can you doubt Inspector Cruickshank?’

‘I don’t,’ said Cadwallader. ‘I’m sure Dudgeon did die of heart failure, everyone does, in the end. And no one can doubt the alcohol. I’d even be willing to put quite a bet on poison.’

‘A poison which the post-mortem failed to detect?’ I said. ‘Not an untraceable poison, Cadwallader, really! One can be drummed out of the Sherlock Holmes Society for the mere mention.’ He ignored me.

‘What did you think of the inspector, Dandy?’ he said.

‘What did I think of what aspect of the inspector?’ I said.

‘Not to mention the doctor,’ he went on.

‘The police surgeon?’ I said. I had not thought much of the police surgeon, truth be told, but before I could properly bring him to mind and wonder why exactly, Cadwallader was speaking again.

‘Did Robert Dudgeon look drunk to you last evening?’ he said.

I shook my head. All of a sudden my scalp prickled.

‘Well, then,’ said Daisy.

Both she and Cad were looking hard at me, waiting. The ludicrous thought struck me that they thought I had had something to do with it all. Why, otherwise, were they staring like that? What did they want?

‘Well then what?’ I demanded.

‘Will you take the job?’

‘What?’

‘Daisy here has filled me in as to your terms.’

‘My…?’

‘And I’ve told him, without a word of a lie, darling, that you’re absolutely splendid, even if you do tend to store your light under the nearest bushel for safekeeping.’

‘Oh, I see!’ said Buttercup at last. ‘Daisy did tell me about you branching out into diamond theft and murder, Dan, but I forgot.’

‘I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way,’ I said. ‘Not on my card, at least.’

‘You have cards?’ said Buttercup, impressed.

‘I don’t,’ I admitted.

‘But you do have the knack,’ said Cad.

I shrugged modestly.

‘And you have the time, Dan,’ said Daisy.

I could hardly deny that.

‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll do it.’ And I thought to myself, why not? Perhaps last time was not a fluke. Perhaps I do have the knack. And I may not have a pipe, nor a deerstalker, nor a magnifying lens, nor an apparent walking cane that is really a sword and a compass, but I do have a Watson. At least I did last time and I was sure I would not have made any headway without him. Now, the question was how to get him off the grouse moor on the twelfth of August. I should have to give him the whole of my fee.