The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

9

Lollie was in brighter spirits by the evening. The police had given permission for the funeral arrangements to proceed on the understanding that cremation was out of the question; the will was to be read the next day, allowing Lollie thereafter to begin to make plans for her widowhood; and as for her state of lonely isolation, Great Aunt Gertrude was on her way. How exactly the old lady expected to get from Inverness to Edinburgh, when the nation was at a standstill and strike officials were stopping motorcars left and right to check that they were not carrying blackleg goods, was unclear. It seemed she had left home without maid or chauffeur, but with a full tank of petrol, two cans in the dicky and an unshakeable belief that her long lifetime of getting exactly what she wanted when she wanted it would hold good, whatever pickets, blockades and rioting gangs might be doing to disrupt the lives of lesser mortals than she.

Downstairs, Mr Faulds was safely back in the bosom of the household after Mrs Hepburn’s selfless dash to the police station to gather him home, and the amazing news of their tryst (which, to give the two principals their due, they did not attempt to rise above but instead acknowledged with throat-clearings and jaw-scratchings on the butler’s side and with blushing smiles from his beloved) gave a larky air to the servants’ hall which an uninformed guest would have found quite appalling.

Miss Rossiter’s position as a newcomer was most welcome, as it conferred upon her the opportunity to sit rather quietly in the midst of the party (and a party it almost was) watching faces, chasing down glances and listening to anything which was not quite being said. The rest of the servants were gathered around the piano, beer glasses in hand, singing an endless selection of popular melodies from the music halls, and rather saltier ones than Mr Faulds had hinted were in their repertoire too: even as far as something apparently called ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ in which each verse was worse than the last.

‘You certainly have been practising, Mattie,’ said Mr Faulds when the hall boy had got through a complicated run of trills in the lead-in to a love song.

‘Aye, I have,’ said Mattie, ‘but it’s more fun to play out loud and no’ fret that I’m gonny disturb anybody.’ He pressed down the loud pedal and fairly banged the notes out of the thing, and Clara and Phyllis pressed their hands together under their hearts, fluttered their eyelids and began singing.

‘Oh Cupid, your harp had

me fooled at the start as

it told me his love was for keeps,

but he’s scarpered…’

‘Take the man’s part, Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn when the girls had got through the first verse and the others had joined them for the chorus (Oh, pluck my heart out now, why don’t you, for everything else you could pluck is away), but Mr Faulds shook his head and held his hands up, protesting.

‘I’m no singer,’ he said, ‘and John knows this one.’ John straightened up and cleared his throat.

‘Forgive me, my maiden,

you are most mistaken,

if you’re telling me

that you languish forsaken,’

he sang in a fair approximation of the most affected music-hall swain. All he needed was a straw boater on the back of his head and a cane to twirl.

‘Oh, pierce me through the heart, why don’t you?

For everything else is torn in two,’

sang the company. I wondered if Millie, carolling away merrily, understood the import of this lyric, if anyone did, and I found myself sharing a little sympathy with the only member of our number who was not lifting his voice in song; Harry, hunched over his latest strike bulletin, scowling at the din.

‘I’m worried that mistress will hear them,’ I said to him, going to sit on the next seat to his at the long table. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’

‘She won’t,’ said Harry, ‘she’ll either be in her boudoir or in that wee parlour at the back. As long as they pipe down before she goes to her bedroom,’ he pointed straight up with his thumb, ‘we’ll be all right. And anyway, do her some good for a change to see the world getting on without a care when she’s miserable.’

This was remarkably callous, I thought, and I could not let it pass unchallenged.

‘What has she done to deserve such scorn?’ I said.

He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered.

‘Not her in particular, miss,’ he said. ‘Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.’

‘Oh Harry,’ I said, ‘there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.’

He argued on – his sort will always argue on – but I had stopped listening because a thought which had been nudging gently against me all day now struck me square. Everyone had agreed that no one could open a locked and bolted door without being heard by those in the rooms nearby. Miss Rossiter, however, was not where she should have been that night, close by the sub-basement door. And Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds – who ought to have been asleep, one beside each of the other doors – had been cavorting together. Now, had Mrs Hepburn said where they were? I concentrated hard to bring the memory of the conversation back to mind, and I was almost certain that she had used the phrase ‘I was with him’. Yes, she had said, ‘I was with him,’ definitely not ‘He was with me,’ which meant that her room, above mine, was empty. I sat back.

Of course that still left Phyllis and Clara who would hear the back door, but then Phyllis had come into that seventeen pounds somehow, and perhaps Clara was an unusually deep sleeper and Phyllis knew it – had not Phyllis complained of how Clara snored? – but how could Phyllis know that Mrs Hepburn was at the front of the house, tucked in with Mr Faulds under the red chenille bedspread, and that I was four flights up on Lollie’s chaise?

‘Are you all right, Miss Rossiter?’ said Harry, who had stopped talking quite some time ago.

‘Fine, Harry,’ I said. ‘I think, though, that I shall say goodnight.’ I needed at least notes if not diagrams for this.

Despite the lusty singing and the glasses of beer which were going strong when I left the room, I had not been in bed long when I heard the party dispersing. Indeed, Harry, Stanley, John and Mattie leaving by the kitchen door sounded like an army on manoeuvres. Mr Faulds locked up after them and shot the bolts with his usual gusto and then I heard Mrs Hepburn enter her room above my head. Mr Faulds and the girls descending the stairs on the other side of the wall was enough to make the water tremble in my bedside glass and, when he secured the sub-basement door, once again the bolts going home rang out all around and above like a hammer on an anvil. I shook my head. No one could possibly have breached this citadel without someone knowing.

Mr Faulds strode away and there was silence, except for the sound of Mrs Hepburn moving around in her stockinged feet, then I heard someone scamper down towards me from the kitchen level. I sprang out of bed and opened my door a crack. Clara was rounding the corner of the passage with her shoes in one hand and a candle in the other, unguarded and guttering.

‘Oh! Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘You nearly made me jump out my skin.’

‘Everything all right?’ I asked her.

‘Fine,’ she said, her little eyes as wide as she could make them. ‘I just had to – you know – go a place before I turned in.’

I frowned at her.

‘But Mr Faulds has locked up,’ I said. ‘If you went to the lavatory, Clara dear, how did you get back in?’

She flushed slightly, I could just see it in the light of the candle.

‘Oh well, you know,’ she said and started sidling towards her door.

‘Didn’t he lock up?’ I persisted. ‘I was sure I heard him. Perhaps I should go up and check.’

‘No!’ said Clara, taking a step towards me. ‘Don’t… I mean… I’m sorry, Miss Rossiter, but that was a wee fib there.’

‘A fib?’

‘Not a bad one,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with… what’s been happening, I mean.’

I wondered if I could carry off the command that had sprung to my mind. I decided to try it.

‘Tell the truth, Clara,’ I said. ‘And shame the devil.’

She stared helplessly at me for a moment and then, as though giving up some internal struggle, she lifted her hands and let them fall again.

‘Come in, dear,’ I said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. ‘Sit down and tell me what you wouldn’t yesterday.’

‘Yesterday?’ she said, and then she nodded, remembering.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, guiding her to the chair. She perched on its edge.

‘It’s what I said about “souvenirs”,’ she said. ‘I – I fell, Miss Rossiter. A while back now.’

‘You had a baby?’ I said. ‘To master?’

‘No,’ Clara said. ‘I mean to say, I was going to and I never told anyone. I just laced my stays tighter and let out my dress seams, like he told me to, and Phyllis never noticed and then, when it was getting nearly time, it came and it was already gone and then that was that.’

‘Your baby died?’ I said gently.

‘It never even… cos you’re no’ supposed to keep yourself tight-laced, are you, miss? Or maybe it wasn’t as close to the right time as I thought. But it was labour, Miss Rossiter, that’s for sure. I’ve seen my mammy labouring and there’s no mistaking it. Except… it seems like a dream now when I think back. It’s hard to believe it happened.’

‘Where were you, Clara?’ I asked, wondering how on earth a girl could have gone through such a thing all alone, in this houseful of people, without someone hearing.

‘Up in the nurseries,’ she said. ‘Right up top there.’

‘And what did you do with… I mean, what did you do afterwards?’

Clara frowned then and shook her head as though trying to clear it.

‘Sometimes I think I came down to the furnace,’ she said. ‘But other times I remember wrapping up a bundle. I don’t know, to be sure. Maybe…’ She lifted her head and stared up at the low ceiling of my room. ‘Maybe it’s still up there.’

It might have seemed fantastical that she did not know, but I had heard of such things before; there was even a long and ugly name for it which I had, thankfully, forgotten.

‘And so tonight?’ I asked her softly. ‘Were you all the way upstairs on the nursery floor just now, Clara? Searching?’

She lowered her head and blinked at me, then she smiled faintly.

‘No, miss. I was in the kitchen.’ She screwed up her nose, looking the very picture of discomfort. ‘Mrs Hepburn made that chocolate thing for mistress’s dinner and she hardly touched it and I asked Millie to set it aside in the scullery for me. I just can’t say no to chocolate, miss, and by the time I’ve paid into my post office book and given something to my ma and got all my doings I’ve never got a penny spare to buy myself some.’

Of course, I should have scolded her, but who would have had the heart? I opened the door for her to leave, only managing to say:

‘You should have torn yourself away from the sing-song and eaten it up earlier. You shouldn’t be scampering about at night. Or eating chocolate for that matter. It’ll give you nightmares.’

It was I, however, who had the wretched night, reeling at top speed through an endless succession of short, senseless dreams: in one I was in the wings of a music-hall stage listening to the compère announcing Mr Faulds and me, but I did not know what the act was that we were presenting and I could not speak to ask anyone; in another I was searching through the laundry rooms of the convalescent home in Perth, undoing bundles of soiled linen looking for something I did not want to find and shushing an unknown someone who was whimpering somewhere close by, telling this unknown someone that we had to be quiet, that no one must ever know; in yet another I was sitting in the flower room at Gilverton, which was as close as I could get to dreaming of Miss Rossiter’s bedroom, I think (one cannot introduce new settings to one’s dream world with swift abandon), and there were men in miners’ helmets with their lanterns lit and smoking, and they were trying the door, rattling the handle and then peering in at me through the window mouthing at me to open up for them. Great Aunt Gertrude was somewhere, I knew she was, although I could not hear her. ‘Ssh!’ I said to Mattie who was banging on a long row of boots and shoes with a drumstick as though playing a glockenspiel. ‘Ssh!’ I hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’

I woke in the cool light of six o’clock and lay gasping, looking around at my room as though at an oasis after forty nights in the wilderness. And here came Mr Faulds to open us up for business once more, the nails in his boots striking hard against the stone floor of the passageway. He pulled back the bolts, giving slightly less than full measure, I thought; certainly it did not ring out in that bone-shaking way it had the evening before. Or perhaps it was just that sounds carried further at night; one often reads that they do. I heard him put the key in the lock, turn it and throw the door wide. This he did with as much brio as he could, sending it bouncing on its hinges.

‘Lovely day, Etheldreda,’ he called upwards and I could hear Eldry’s faint answer.

‘Tell Mrs Hepburn two eggs for me this morning,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t mind a taste of that ham just to see if it’s fit for company.’ Whistling, he turned, passed along to the stairs again and skipped up them, making a little tune with his shoes like a tap-dancer.

One of the benefits of Miss Rossiter’s life, I thought to myself as I dressed for the visit to the solicitor’s office, was the release from all concerns of wardrobe. Had I been appearing as Mrs Gilver, I should have been lucky to get away without several changes before the competing demands of sobriety and decoration were satisfied, for while one would not wish to look jaunty upon such an errand, neither would one want one’s black cape and veil to outdo the widow’s. Nothing, unless it be wearing white to a wedding, is poorer form than that. As it was, Miss Rossiter got her grey serge, lisle stockings, black shoes, felt hat and armband on in four minutes flat. I was even becoming used to the look of my scraped-back hair and shining, soap-and-water face and wondered whether I were not looking rather better than usual – more youthful, fresher somehow – a possibility I put down to the settled routines and clean living of a servant’s life until I realised that between the endless note-making, the rushing about the streets, the nightmares and the way that strong drink punctuated the hours, my two days spent below stairs in Heriot Row had been the least settled of recent memory. Probably it was only the dim light and the elderly looking-glass which gave the effect and if I glanced into Lollie’s dressing-table glass upstairs in the sunshine I should be disabused.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait until Great Aunt Gertrude gets here?’ I asked Lollie, when I got to her. She simply gazed back at me. The skin around her eyes was yellow and her hands trembled as she lifted her hat onto her head. ‘Here, let me,’ I said. I secured her hat none too firmly, for they are fearsome things to stick into someone else’s hair if one is not accustomed to it, or perhaps just if one has finer feelings than Grant, who wields a hatpin like Captain Ahab with his last harpoon.

Lollie shook her head.

‘Mr Hardy wants to know if there’s anything of note in it,’ she said. Her voice was gravelly as though with exhaustion, very worrying in one known to have slept away the bulk of the last two days, and I determined to get her doctor to her when we returned from our outing. ‘Besides, there might be something in it about a funeral – instructions, I mean, or requests, or something. It’s best to get it over and done with.’

‘Didn’t you ever talk about funerals?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know what he would have wanted, if you c-’

‘If I care?’ Lollie said. ‘I shouldn’t care, should I? And yet, it’s hard not to. And no, we never spoke of such things. Pip was twenty-six, why would we?’ I had not been imagining long, morbid discussions on their own account, of course, but rather thinking of Hugh and how he always spent the return trip from any funeral in high dudgeon about the mawkish unsuitability of the chosen hymns and the scandalous impropriety of anything – from florists’ wreaths to panelled coffins – that his father and father’s father and his father had ‘managed perfectly well to die without, Dandy’. What he would do when this much-vaunted new prayer book finally came out, I could not imagine; I had never seen anyone walk out of a funeral in protest before but I would not put it past him.

‘We only ever spoke of it once,’ Lollie went on. She was looking at herself in the glass as though she were some sort of puzzling find brought home from a nature walk; she pulled at her eyelids and stretched the skin on her cheeks this way and that. It was disconcerting to watch and I caught hold of her hands, as though to inspect her nails, really just to stop that dreadful, inquisitive mauling.

‘When was that, dear?’ I said.

‘When he went to Paris without me. It was the only night we spent apart after we were married. He made a joke of it; saying that if I were proved right, if the aeroplane went down – that’s why I didn’t go with him, you see – I would have carried the point and should feel free to bring his body back by boat.’ She smiled, remembering, and her skin looked tight and dry as she did so. ‘I shouldn’t think there are instructions, in the will,’ she said. ‘Pip was never one to make demands about things. Not at home anyway, or at his tailor’s or at his bank. He was the most easy-going man, really, Dandy. Everyone said so.’

I thought it best to remain silent.

‘He could get rather impassioned about his model boats,’ Lollie went on, ‘but even when one of those was broken through a servant’s carelessness he just shrugged it off. He was-’ She broke off. ‘Except he wasn’t,’ she said, with a harder note in her voice. ‘I keep slipping into the most fearful maudlin daydreams, Dandy. As if I’m under some kind of spell. I know very well what he was and so do you.’

‘Let’s go,’ I said, thinking that this robust mood would carry her out of the house and into her motorcar better than any other. ‘And don’t worry about the funeral. Two horses and “Lead, kindly light”. These things practically organise themselves.’

Faulds, sombre of face and – for once – silent of foot, let us out of the front door. John was waiting at the kerb. It was the first time I had seen him in his full livery: a high-collared tunic to match his breeches and a grey cap with a gleaming black peak, his face as impassive as a guardsman’s under its shadow. He opened the back door of a very new Rolls-Royce Phantom and between us we helped Lollie up into the seat. John leaned in and put a rug over her knees, then offered a hand to me to help me into the front. I thanked him, finding my voice a little shy, for it was an odd business to be handed into a car by a young man one has seen singing music-hall songs in his shirtsleeves, and an unaccustomed experience to sit beside him, no glass to close between the two of us.

Lollie, behind me, was looking out of the window at the quiet streets. There were nannies, off to Princes Street Gardens with their charges for an hour before luncheon, pairs of girls – the well-turned-out daughters of the New Town – making their way arm in arm to the jewellers’ and dress shops of George Street, pairs of matrons – their mothers – on their way to Marshall & Aitken, and upright old men marching to the New Club for the day. What there were not, though, were delivery boys on their bicycles, nor coalmen on their carts, sweeps with their barrows, not even the late postman on the parcel round.

‘How quiet it is today,’ Lollie said, with a wondering note in her voice, as we came around Charlotte Square. ‘The whole world seems to have stopped. Not only me.’

At the west end, a policeman mounted on a horse was standing backed into the doorway of Mather’s public house.

‘Trying to stop them gathering today,’ said John.

‘The publican won’t be very pleased,’ I said, ‘to have a great hulking police horse driving away his custom.’

‘There’ll not be much beer left now anyway, Miss Rossiter,’ John told me. ‘There’s been three nights since the last delivery and there was parties all over the night it begun.’

‘I heard them,’ I said, remembering the cheers and shouting drifting in the bedroom window in the small hours of Tuesday morning.

‘Any excuse for a booze-up,’ said John. ‘Best night out since Hogmanay.’ He winked at me. ‘Or so I heard, anyway.’ Here he dropped his voice even further in case Lollie could hear him. ‘Till the funeral, eh?’ He jerked his head towards his mistress. ‘Talk about having something to celebrate.’

‘Poor master,’ I said. ‘There are limits, John.’

‘He didnae think so,’ John retorted. ‘And I should know. I spent more time with him than anyone else, except Harry maybe.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘One could hardly drive him around and not get the measure of the man.’

‘Aye, I got his measure,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t feart for him, like some I could name. He was your typical mummy’s boy. Sleekit wee bully-boy. Nice as ninepence when anyone was watching and then a right so-and-so when he got the chance.’

‘Was he a right so-and-so to you personally?’ I asked. John nodded.

‘He used to make me sleep in the car,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t so bad in the summertime but once in the winter I near about froze to death.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How did he stop you going inside and sleeping in your bed? How could he?’

‘No, not at home,’ said John. ‘This was if he was away out somewhere and he would say to me to just wait in the car, then he just never came back and the night would go on and then in the end I’d realise that he wasnae gonny come back and he’d done it to me again, so I’d just have to doss down until the morning.’

‘Where was this?’ I said, wondering what these solitary outings of Pip’s might be.

‘Eh?’ said John. ‘Oh, you know, here and there. Nowhere special. I can’t remember where it was we were the last time it happened.’

His vagueness set a faint alarm bell ringing in me, but at that moment we drew up outside the offices of Murray and Ettrick in Coates Crescent and I had to concentrate on assisting Lollie. We were met at the door by Mr Ettrick himself, as I should have expected given the size of the estate; if Mr Murray had been there brushing flies from our path with banana leaves it would not have been too surprising.

‘All alone, Mrs Balfour?’ he said, his eyes passing over me without stopping and peering at the inside of the motorcar behind me. ‘I expected Mrs Lambert-Leslie to be with you.’

‘She’s on her way from Inverness,’ said Lollie, ‘but might take some time.’

Mr Ettrick shook his head and tutted, then ushered Lollie up the steps and through the glass doors with one hand in the small of her back and the other thrown wide as though to ward off any harm coming at her in a flanking manoeuvre. I supposed that a solicitor had to be solicitous, if anyone did, and she was a new widow and very fragile-looking, but still as I followed them – Miss Rossiter, of course, was not included in the ushering – the crease of concern between his brows and the way he stooped over her, as well as that arm shielding her from one knew not what, began to worry me.

We crossed a dark hallway, deeply carpeted in blue plush and shining with the gleam of mahogany, the glitter of brass and the wink of polished mirrors, and rose up a set of wide and shallow stairs. Somewhere, deep in the innards of Murray and Ettrick, at least a few typewriting machines were clacking away like crickets, but these front parts – the stairs and the cavernous room we were taken into at the top of them – were hushed and still, free of any modern trappings and looking, with their tall cases full of well-bound books and deep button-backed chairs, exactly like a club library, only less smoky.

I seated myself neatly on a hard bench just inside the door and watched as Mr Ettrick led Lollie to an armchair and settled her into it as though she were a grandmother. As he turned away from her, his frown deepened and he rubbed his palms on his trousers.

‘Now… Mrs Balfour,’ he said, once he had sat down on the other side of an imposing desk, and clasped his hands together on top of it. ‘First of all, please allow me to say how very sorry we are. Murray and Ettrick have long been honoured to serve the legal needs of the Balfour family and we feel in our small way some of the shock and disbelief this most dreadful event must have brought to you.’ The words were conventional, but Mr Ettrick was an old hand at it and the tone and expression were perfect. Then he faltered. ‘Let me say, dear lady,’ he went on, looking down at his hands on the desk, ‘that we did not draw up your late husband’s will, nor did anyone in this office co-sign it as witness. We merely held it. We… that is to say, I… no one read it until yesterday morning.’ At this point Mr Ettrick’s discomfort led him as far as to acknowledge my existence. He gave me a quick look and then glanced towards the empty chair beside Lollie. I rose silently and came to sit in it.

‘Very well then,’ he continued. He wore the usual tall stiff celluloid collar of the town solicitor and at that moment it appeared to be strangling him. He gulped once or twice, then took a pair of small spectacles out of his breast pocket and wound them onto his ears with some deliberation. He was a man in his fifties but just then I could see the twenty-year-old he had once been. He drew towards him the green paper folder which was the only item on the desk-top and opened it.

‘I, Philip James Balfour of 31 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, do declare this 5th day of March in the year 1926 that this is my last will and testament and renders all earlier testamentary documents bearing my name null and void.’ Mr Ettrick cleared his throat and gripped the paper a little tighter. ‘I hereby give and bequeath everything of which I may die possessed or which may be hereafter due to me, both heritable property and moveable assets, in their entirety, to my cousin, George Pollard, formerly resident in St Mary’s Square, Gloucester.’ The solicitor bent his head and I felt Lollie stiffen in the chair beside me. ‘This disposition of my estate is in recognition of and recompense for the iniquities meted out from my forebears to that branch of the Balfour family connected by marriage to the Pollard family and to which my esteemed cousin belongs.’

‘He can’t do that,’ I said, putting an arm along the back of Lollie’s chair. ‘Mr Ettrick, I must protest in the strongest terms to you subjecting Mrs Balfour to this performance. You know very well that under Scots Law the widow cannot be disinherited.’

Mr Ettrick was holding up a hand like a policeman stopping traffic.

‘If you would allow me, Miss er…’ he said, and bent his head to continue reading.

‘I request that this gift and bequest be paid not earlier than two calendar years after the date of my death until which time it shall be held in trust for the said George Pollard excepting the payment of funeral costs and other necessary expenses, for example but without prejudice to the generality, outstanding personal bills.’

‘But he can’t,’ I insisted. ‘This is nonsense.’

‘Please,’ said Mr Ettrick. ‘If you would have just a little patience. I am coming to it, I assure you. I appoint Bertram Ettrick, Solicitor, as my executor and overseer of the trust and request specifically that he expedite with all possible haste the removal from my house at Heriot Row all servants and other residents, including Miss Walburga Percival.’

‘What?’ said Lollie and I felt a jolt pass through her.

‘There’s a little more,’ said Mr Ettrick, his voice so quiet now that I could hardly hear it. ‘There’s a codicil, requesting that George Pollard, after the will is fully executed of course, ascertain the burial place of my wife, Josephine Beatrice Balfour née Carson, born 22nd August 1890 and died 10th July 1924, and erect there a monument, the choosing of which I entrust to him, assured of his affectionate attention in this matter.’

‘Who?’ said Lollie. She was sitting forward, straining out of her seat, almost keening towards him, trying to understand. Mr Ettrick, unable to bear the look upon her face, directed his gaze instead at me.

‘Who witnessed it?’ I asked and he nodded slightly, as though acknowledging the sense of my question.

‘It was witnessed by a Miss Margaret Anne Taylor and a Miss Jessie Armstrong Abbott. Neither are known to me.’

‘Abbott and Maggie,’ said Lollie, in a dazed voice. ‘My maids, Mr Ettrick. Two of my maids.’

‘Ex-maids,’ I said, furiously thinking what that might mean, for it had to mean something.

Mr Ettrick had risen and gone to a section of bookcase lower than the rest where a sherry decanter and glasses were set out. He poured himself a stiff measure, swallowed it in one gulp and then refilled his glass and two others. He handed mine to me with a grim look and then placed Lollie’s carefully into her hand, wrapping her fingers around it. She put it down into her lap without a glance, but I admit that I knocked mine back just as readily and as indecorously as Mr Ettrick had his first and, I saw, his second.

‘I thought you were a maid yourself, madam, at first,’ he said to me. ‘I do beg your pardon.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Now, Mr Ettrick, the question is this: is it legal? It’s perfectly wicked, but is it legal? Will it stand?’

‘Ah!’ said Lollie and she raised her hands as though at some spectacle laid out before her, letting her glass tumble down, spilling sherry over her skirt and stockings. ‘1924! And we were married in 1921. And so we weren’t married, were we? I see.’ She sounded relieved, happy to have sorted the puzzling words of the will into something that made sense to her; she even smiled a little, but no sooner had the smile left her lips than she swayed back in her seat and then in one fluid movement, like an eel, she slipped downwards and, unless I had caught her under her arms and held her, would have slithered onto the floor.

Mr Ettrick, sturdier after all than the strangulated neck inside the stiff collar suggested, easily took her weight from me and carried her over to a sofa against the far wall, where he laid her down and stood over her, shaking his head and breathing loudly.

‘If this earlier marriage to Miss Carson is right enough,’ he said, ‘and if she really did die in 1924 then, yes, I daresay it’s perfectly legal and I’ll have no choice but to execute it. The wording is not what I would have written myself, but – most unfortunately – it’s clear enough that any objections would be batted away as cavils. If I had known what was in it, it would have been a different matter, though, I can tell you. Murray and Ettrick have never been party to any such thing in eighty years of practice, Miss er…’

‘What interests me particularly,’ I said, thinking back over all that I had just heard, ‘is the two years’ delay. Have you ever come across such a thing before? Is it usual?’

‘Never,’ said Mr Ettrick. He stooped to retrieve Lollie’s sherry glass and returned it to the tray, taking the opportunity while he was there to pour himself a third measure. ‘It’s quite common to have a stipulation that a will has to be executed within a year, or two, or five, if there’s some doubt as to whether the legatee can be traced, for instance. But as to waiting two years, I have no idea.’

On the couch, Lollie shifted a little and moaned softly.

‘I’ll fetch the chauffeur,’ I said. ‘She should be at home.’ Then I shook my head and laughed. ‘Home! She has no home, does she? You are charged to break the household up as soon as you can manage it.’

‘Expedite with all possible haste,’ said Mr Ettrick, nodding. ‘It sounds marvellous, doesn’t it, Miss er… but Mr Balfour had no legal training and, legally speaking, it doesn’t mean a thing. That is, I interpret it as meaning “carry out with as much haste as is commensurate with the comfort and convenience of all affected parties”. Yes, indeed, that’s what it means to me.’

Mr Ettrick, in other words, was that fabled beast: a lawyer with a heart of gold. He was in Pip’s employ and could not resign from it, but he was in Lollie’s corner. He was a small mercy in all of this and I thanked heaven for him.