The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

11

‘So, Fanny,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘Ernest tells me you’ve got something to say. No. not like that, Mollie-moo. Watch Eldry and copy what she does.’ The tweenie and scullerymaid were engaged on some mysterious task at the table, with sheets of waxed paper and large pairs of scissors. Millie put down her scissors and her paper – in tatters after her efforts – and bunched her hands together under her chin. She gazed at Eldry with devoted attention and Eldry, snipping neat fringes into her own paper strip, could not help beaming back. Really, I thought, every servants’ hall should have a Millie, someone to make the others feel suave and competent and give them scope to be kind.

Mrs Hepburn was holding the enormous teapot over the collection of cups, with her head cocked, and as soon as she heard Clara’s clogs on the passageway flags she started pouring.

‘Mattie,’ she said. ‘So weak it’s not worth dirtying a cup for and no more than three sugars mind, for that Calvert’s powder cannot work miracles and I’m not sending you back to see your mammy with those wee pearlies all ruined.’ Mattie smiled as he took his cup of dishwater tea; he did indeed have sparkling white teeth and I sympathised with Mrs Hepburn about the guarding of them. Clara arrived with a large platter covered in a teacloth and set it down.

‘Miss Rossiter?’ said Mrs Hepburn, with the pot poised.

‘I’ll have a good dark cup today, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said, for I had fast learned that the strident Indian blend beloved of the servants’ hall could not be outwitted by dilution and was best got over one’s gullet strong, milky and sweet, so that one might pretend it was not tea at all but some kind of exotic soup.

Mr Faulds reached across from the head of the table and twitched the teacloth from on top of the plate, revealing a mountain range of warm scones, flour-dusted, current-studded and steaming gently. There was a murmur of appreciation from all around the table as the scent of them wafted over us, and Phyllis began dishing out tea plates, a large pat of cold butter on each one.

‘Food of the gods, Kitty,’ said Mr Faulds as he bit into his first one. ‘I never thought I’d say it, but I don’t miss jam and cream when it’s your scones under my butter.’

John gave a snort of laughter and, indeed, there was something inexplicably lewd-sounding about the compliment. Mrs Hepburn tutted, but with a twinkle in her eye.

‘Make the most of the scones and the leisure,’ she said, ‘because there’ll be no more of either after today.’ She filled another three cups and Harry pushed them across the table to their destinations. ‘I’ve two cakes to mix when the tins are dressed and they hams to glaze and the whole house to get ready for the funeral with no kitchener, and there’s you-know-who on her way. I’ll tell you this, Fanny, that woman doubles the work of the house single-handed.’

‘Mrs Lambert-Leslie?’ I said.

‘Aye, Great Aunt Goitre,’ said Clara. ‘Maybe she’ll have learned to use a handle by now, eh?’

‘Some chance,’ said Phyllis. ‘You know, Miss Rossiter, she shuts every blooming door and drawer and cupboard with one of her big fat hands flat against the wood. Smears the mahogany in her bedroom like you wouldnae believe if we told you.’

‘And it’s your turn to do her feet this time, Phyllis,’ said Clara, ‘because I did them at Christmas and wrote it down and got Mr Faulds to sign it.’

‘Please, girls, not while we’re eating,’ said the butler. Stanley was looking pained and moved a mouthful of scone from one cheek to the other without swallowing any.

‘And if she’s brought a boot-load of washing with her she can raffle it,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Treating this place like a laundry and never leaves a penny tip behind her. But there, she’s an old woman on her own and nobody presses a lace edge like Eldry, so let’s see if we can’t look after her even better this time. She’s mistress’s only living relative now.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said, although whether I meant living relatives or witnessed documents I could not say, ‘mistress has said I can tell you what happened at the lawyers’ this morning. And Mr Hardy wants you all to know too, before he speaks to you again.’

‘Well?’ said Mr Faulds. He had his curled fists resting on the table, looking like the chairman of the board.

‘Master’s will had a very nasty surprise in it,’ I said. ‘Mistress has been cut right out altogether.’ I paused to allow this to sink in.

‘The devil,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Oh, the fiend!’

‘What, cut off with nothing?’ said Harry. ‘Not a shilling?’ He was frowning at me. I had determined to gloss over the matter of Josephine Carson, trusting that no one of the servant class would be acquainted with the details of testamentary law, but now I wondered whether the valet knew too much about wills and succession to let this go by.

‘Surprised you care,’ said John, saving me from having to answer. ‘Many’s the time I’ve heard you calling her and him both for sitting back on their what’s-its instead of earning a day’s pay.’

‘My poor mistress,’ said Mr Faulds, and then in the next breath. ‘Here, Fanny, what about us?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘There were no bequests to anyone.’

‘Not even a wee minder for any of us?’ said Clara. ‘After four years?’

‘That’s cold for you,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘but it’s not what I was getting at. I meant what about us, Number 31, the household, if mistress has been left without a penny?’

‘So where’s it all gone then?’ said Millie and the others turned to look at her. In her simplicity, she had not frittered off into questions of just deserts and repercussions, but had kept her whole mind squarely on the pot of gold.

‘Exactly,’ I said, and as one they turned back to me. ‘He has left it to a relation, by the name of George Pollard. A cousin, it seems.’

For a short moment no one spoke and then the clamour began.

‘A cousin? What cousin? He’s never been here. Pollard? I’ve never heard of him. Has mistress met him? Does the lawyer know him? Will he be running the house then? Will we still have our jobs? Who is he? Why should he come in for a fortune?’

‘So,’ I said, carefully looking around at them all, one by one. ‘No one knew?’

‘Us? Why would we know? Think we would know and not tell mistress? What are you hinting at?’

‘Simply,’ I said, ‘that Miss Abbott and Maggie witnessed the will and I thought they might have mentioned something about it. I’m sure I couldn’t have bitten my tongue if it were me.’

Harry sat forward.

‘Maggie and Jessie Abbott?’ he said. ‘Them that left. Why would that be, then?’

‘Ah, but Miss Rossiter,’ said Mr Faulds, ignoring him, ‘they needn’t have read what was in it. Probably never even saw it. I believe it’s customary to draw a blank sheet over the page and leave only the bottom portion where the signatures go.’

‘How would you know that, Mr Faulds?’ said Phyllis, rather pertly.

‘Oh, we all know Mr Faulds has led a full life,’ said John. ‘Eh, Mrs Hepburn?’ But this was going too far even for such an affable butler as Ernest Faulds and he scowled the grin off the chauffeur’s face in a way of which my very own Pallister would have been proud.

‘As for your jobs,’ I said, ‘the will was very clear. The house is to be sold.’ There was a collective gasp at that and Mrs Hepburn put her cup down hard in its saucer. ‘Everyone has to leave and the money is to be held until George Pollard comes forward to collect it.’

Harry was the first to speak.

‘Your jobs?’ he said. ‘Your jobs, Miss Rossiter? Do you think mistress will be keeping a lady’s maid then?’

I bit my lip at the blunder but said nothing as Harry continued.

‘Is that why you’re passing all this on, like so much cosy gossip? “I’m all right, Jack”? So much for solidarity, eh?’

‘Don’t be a clown, Harry,’ said Phyllis. ‘Don’t be so rude to everyone all the time.’

‘Miss Rossiter was quite right to tell us,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘if mistress asked her to. And you said something about Mr Hardy too, Fanny?’

This was the point I had been leading up to and dreading. This was the moment when below stairs at Number 31 Heriot Row would cease to be the snug little burrow where all could gather together for pronouncements about the doings of those above over buttered scones and tea.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mr Hardy has taken me into his confidence quite remarkably.’

‘Spotted you for one of his own,’ said Harry sourly, but the others shushed him.

‘Indeed, Harry,’ I said, ‘he’s under considerable pressure with the strike and this case is exactly what he didn’t need on top of it all, so I daresay he has been less… professional than he might have. He knew that I, unlike the rest of you, had no quarrel with Mr Balfour and no reason to want him dead and so he knew he could talk to me.’

‘Now, here, wait a minute,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘You’ve no call to be talking that way, Fanny Rossiter, even though, mind you, it’s true enough, true enough. You carry on and finish your piece.’

‘I think everyone here felt ill disposed towards master to some extent, although some have been more discreet than others.’ I bowed in acknowledgement to Mr Faulds, who accepted the compliment with a court bow of his own. ‘And everyone said that they couldn’t care less who killed him and wouldn’t want whoever it was to be punished for it.’ My mouth was dry and I took a sip of tea. ‘But that was when you thought one of your number had struck back, had lashed out in protest, or self-defence, or revenge for some injury you could all imagine.’ They were in the palm of my hand now. ‘Only that’s not what Mr Hardy thinks happened. And I agree. What he thinks is that George Pollard got wind of his inheritance and killed Mr Balfour for it. And – here’s the rub – he thinks someone let him into the house and that can’t have happened – couldn’t have – without someone else hearing something or seeing something of what was going on.’

There was perfect silence now in the servants’ hall.

‘So,’ I went on, ‘any of you who is perhaps keeping quiet about… anything: someone not where they ought to have been, or being where they oughtn’t; a noise you couldn’t account for; a key out of place or a door that should have been locked left open… what you need to see is that you’re not protecting one of your friends who suffered as you did. You’re protecting someone who is quite happy to see you jobless, out on the street, all of you.’

Clara and Phyllis were both staring at me fixedly and did not see Mattie glance quickly between the two of them. John saw it, though, and tried to catch Harry’s eye. Stanley was drilling a look down towards the floor that could have shattered the stone flags there, and Millie and Eldry avoided looking at one another so studiedly and with such a deep pink bloom on their cheeks that they might as well have stared and pointed.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘You could cut the air in here with a knife and tile a roof with it. You’ve set the cat amongst the pigeons now, Fan.’ She cast her gaze around her staff, frowning. ‘What’s to do with you all, eh?’

‘They’re just upset, Kitty,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Overwrought, as are we all, I’m sure. Miss Rossiter, do you really think that someone could be so lost to goodness that he – or she, of course – would protect one murderer but not another? I hardly think any of our young people is as calculating as all that.’

‘Self-preservation is a powerful force, Mr Faulds,’ I said. ‘Just to be as plain as possible and make sure everyone understands,’ – I was thinking chiefly of Millie here – ‘if George Pollard did it and he gets caught, then the will is ripped into little pieces, Mrs Balfour – as the widow – inherits, and this house carries on just as before, only better by far for the loss of master. So the choice for someone who knows something and could tell is protect one or save all. It’s as stark as that.’

There was another long silence then. The upper servants as far as Phyllis and Stanley had collected themselves, and were now wearing poker faces of admirable rectitude; well-trained in the art by their years of standing at the edge of intimate domestic scenes as untouched by what passed between master and mistress as a lamp post is by the lives of those who walk through its light. Millie, Eldry and especially Mattie were quite another proposition, never having needed to develop impassive faces in scullery, laundry and coalhole. Mattie looked close to tears and the kitchen girls were still flushed and fidgety.

‘Well, let’s not dwell on such things unduly,’ said Mr Faulds, addressing us all. ‘I’m sure that Superintendent Hardy and Mr Ettrick between them will see mistress right and she’ll do right by us too. But if any of you does have something to say to Mr Hardy when he returns, you should say it, and God forgive you for not saying it straight away on Monday like you know you should have.’ He shot a look at me as though to see if that would satisfy me. I gave a tight smile and a suggestion of a nod. ‘Now, it’s Friday tomorrow,’ he said. He dabbed up a few scone crumbs with his finger, chewed them daintily and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘And it should have been Maggie’s day off.’

‘Oh, can I have it, Mr Faulds?’ said Phyllis. ‘It’s not fair having a rotten old Tuesday for my free afternoon. Let me swap it, and I’ll do Great Aunt Goitre and not complain – promise.’

‘You’re doing her anyway,’ said Clara. ‘It’s your turn.’

‘I’ve decided that Miss Rossiter should step into Maggie’s free days,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Sorry, Phyllis. Fanny, if that’s all right with you.’

I could not have been more delighted, for Alec would be here by the following day and a free afternoon was more than I could have hoped for to spend with him. We had not arranged how to meet but later that evening, with the greatest imaginable fuss and uproar, Mrs Lambert-Leslie finally arrived. Mr Faulds went out to meet the lady, Stanley helping to ferry a great many bags and boxes up the front steps, Clara – caught on the hop – rushed upstairs with the water jug and hot bottle for her bedroom, Lollie rang down to ask if that was Great Aunt Gertrude arriving, Phyllis sped to her side to say that it was and her passenger got out of the motorcar, let himself in at the area steps and pushed a note for Miss Rossiter through the letter box. Miss Rossiter was in the servants’ hall at the time and saw the three sets of legs come down with the note and go up again: one pair of legs in grey flannel bags and town brogues, four liver and white legs with soft fringes, and another four, long, smooth, beloved, spotted legs which brought a lump to my throat as I glimpsed them.

‘Damned fellow brought his dogs,’ Great Aunt Gertrude was saying, as I stepped into Lollie’s boudoir with a tea tray, ‘all the way from Perthshire with two tails whipping in my face. Pretty little spaniel and a Dalmatian bitch with even less sense than most. Tea?’ she enquired, seeing me. I nodded and bobbed. ‘Oh well, why not,’ she said, ‘as long as there’s a drink on its way soon. And I smelled ham when I came in. Run down and get Mrs Hepburn to cut me a sandwich, would you, girl? And one for my niece. I don’t like this peaky look of hers.’

No one, I thought, could describe Mrs Lambert-Leslie as having a peaky look. She was a large pink person, with plain features gathered all together in the middle of her face and a great deal of cheek and jowl and forehead around them. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a fan-shape at the front, leaving a sparse little bun, very neglected, at the back, just above her collar. It was not an attempt at a fashionable hairstyle which had gone woefully wrong, nor even a relic of some earlier arrangement which had survived and mutated as one often sees in ladies of a certain age. It was inexplicable and could only have been carried off by a woman of titanic self-confidence. Great Aunt Gertrude, needless to say, managed.

‘Who was it who gave you the lift anyway?’ said Lollie, and I was interested to hear that her voice was calm and sounded neither flat nor suspiciously animated. The doctor must have mixed up a magic potion out of his bag which had dulled her down and picked her up and left her in the middle. ‘You didn’t just stand by the side of the road and wave your stick, did you?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Great Aunt Gertrude with a shout of laughter, ‘but no. He’s Millicent Osborne’s sister Daphne’s grandson. Dorset. Good family. Although there was something about him… I forget what now… came into an estate somehow that wasn’t quite the thing. But it’s a neat enough place. Of course, I only saw the drive and the hall, but you can tell a lot from gravel, I always say. And he’s not married. So I’ve invited him for dinner. You were too young last time of course, but you can’t hang about now. Here – girl! What are you standing there for? Sandwich, sandwich. And you can take the smaller of the two bags with the straps on downstairs with you. All that’s for washing.’

I glanced at Lollie again as I left to see how well she was standing up to this extraordinary person and her outlandish suggestion, but either the doctor’s powders were potent ones or she was too used to her aunt to be shocked by anything, for she gave me a mild smile to send me on my way and turned back to listen to the report of the journey which was just beginning.

I half expected a timorous knock or two on my door that night or the following morning, as one or other of the junior staff wrestled with their consciences and decided to give up their secrets. I even made sure that I was busy in the little laundry room so that I might not miss the knock when it came, and listened intently whenever I heard a pair of feet descend to the sub-basement. There was a great deal of traffic up and down for, as well as the usual commerce of the house and the extra burden of our exacting guest, Mr Hardy had indeed returned and all the servants trooped up to be grilled by him once more.

All I got for my pains, in the end, was a pile of rather limp underclothes – Lollie’s (I drew the line at ‘the smaller of’ Great Aunt Gertrude’s strapped bags which was not much smaller and was stuffed to bursting) – as well as a crick in my neck and very sore knuckles from scrubbing wet cloth between them. There was presumably some knack to this which Grant had neglected to pass on to me, but I consoled myself that dishpan hands, as they call them in the cold cream advertisements, were an authentic touch for Miss Rossiter and I should take them out on my free afternoon with pride.

After luncheon – haddock and egg pie, fried potatoes and pickled beetroot followed by steamed ginger sponge and custard – I tidied my hair, put on a cameo brooch and a pair of fine stockings, jammed my copious notes into Miss Rossiter’s best bag and left by the area door, to meet Alec – as his letter had suggested and as was most fitting for a lady’s maid on her free afternoon – under the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens.

I set off with head high and heart stout, but by the time I had crossed George Street – the spine of the New Town – and was descending again, my footsteps had started to falter as I imagined what I might see when I emerged onto Princes Street, with who knew what gangs gathered there and what scuffles brewing.

There were indeed a dozen or so men standing arm in arm at the top of the steps which led down to Waverley station, with perhaps a dozen more marching up and down in front of them carrying signs on sticks. Three policemen stood in the road, very still, simply watching, but they had their whistles between their teeth: even at this distance I could see the glint of the chains which fastened them to their breast pockets.

And how could three policemen stand still in the carriageway on Edinburgh’s busiest thoroughfare on a Friday afternoon? Quite simply because aside from the little tableau they made with the pickets and the sign wavers, Princes Street was empty. Oh, the shops were lighted and open and there were customers going in and out, but very few, and they walked quickly with their heads down and their voices low and, besides, the pavement with its window displays and awnings and tempting doorways, which would draw the eye on any other shopping street but this one, is always – even on ordinary days – belittled by the great broad flat road and, on its other side, the green sweep of gardens falling away and then rising up to the jagged skyline of the Old Town and the hulk of the Castle Rock. Today, with the road deserted, tramlines still, bus stops unpeopled, rabble of motor lorries and taxicabs and horse carts gone like ghosts when the lamp snaps on, a handful of shoppers scurrying in and out with their parcels were like sandhoppers on the tideline against the expanse of emptiness behind them, and so the emptiness was all one could see and all one could hear was the silence.

I felt a fluttering in my throat as my pulse quickened. I had laughed at Hugh, even at Harry, but this was no Edinburgh I had ever known, this was no country of mine, and just for a moment, I feared for us all.

Then I heard a shout from the other side of the street and, looking over, saw Alec silhouetted under the arches of the monument waving wildly at me. I looked to both sides for traffic – for one cannot suppress these instincts – and crossed the deserted street towards him, towards the whining, circling bundle of pent-up ecstasy on the end of the lead.

‘My darling!’ I sank onto my knees and let Bunty yelp and sniff and lick my hat and trample her paws all over the front of my coat and skirt and wipe quantities of her stiff white hairs onto me and wheel away to gallop off some of her joy and then come back to do it all again. Eventually she dropped down, rolled onto her back and wriggled this way and that with her eyes half-closed and her tongue lolling out of one side of her mouth and I stood, brushed myself and resecured my hatpin.

‘Well, I can’t compete with that for a welcome,’ said Alec, ‘but it is good to see you, Dandy.’

‘And you,’ I said, returning his quick hug. ‘Hello, Millie.’ Alec’s spaniel, sitting primly at his side, waggled her bottom briefly.

‘Shall we go down out of the breeze? I said, for it was rather gusty.

‘If we can get past the doormen,’ said Alec, pointing to the top of the steps where two policemen were standing shoulder to shoulder, their mouths set and their eyes grim.

Of course, both policemen stepped aside and one touched his hat as we passed them, and we descended to the lower level and claimed an empty bench, one looking down over the railway lines which emerge from the glass roof of the station and briefly bisect a portion of the gardens before disappearing into a tunnel which runs under the rest of them. Princes Street Gardens, I thought as I looked around, are at their best in May, crowded with tulips and pansies and wearing fresh new cloaks of green on the ground and in the air. (Later in the summer the green grass would turn yellow if it were dry or wear through to the earth from the tramp of feet if it were rainy, the green leaves of the trees would darken with smuts from the trains, the growers of the bedding plants would have outdone themselves for double and treble and quadruple begonias all of monstrous size and unlikely colour, and the benches would be dusty and sticky so that even if one were not actually sitting amongst picnic litter with spilled lemonade under one’s feet, it always felt that way.)

‘Very odd with no trains, isn’t it?’ said Alec. ‘You get used to there always being a few chuffing away at the platforms. It’s like being in a summer meadow today.’

‘Apart from the shouting,’ I said. From the station I could hear voices and what sounded like a drum being beaten in slow threatening time. I jumped as a particularly lusty yell reached our ears.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many special constables in the station there’s hardly room on the tracks for the strikers and they were sharing out cigarettes and playing cards together when I looked in on them.’

‘You went down there!’

Alec grinned at me. ‘I told the bobbies I was a volunteer.’

‘Are you going to volunteer?’ I said. ‘Do be careful.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alec. ‘I just put a ten-shilling note in the strikers’ collecting tin at Platform 3, so it would be rather inconsistent. Oh, don’t look at me like that! The Prince of Wales sent them a tenner. Now, Dandy – fill me in.’

I heaved in a huge breath, planning to expend it on the start of my tale, but long before I had decided where to begin I had to let it go all in a rush, for fear of bursting. The same thing happened with the second breath. Bunty, who had come to rest her muzzle in my lap, looked up at me with wrinkled brows and blinked at the draught.

‘A hippo in a mudhole,’ said Alec. ‘Top marks.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Very well, I shall try and you must make of it what you can. You knew already what sort of husband Pip Balfour was, but what I’ve discovered is that it wasn’t just Lollie. Everyone hated him, with very good reason too, except…’

‘Except?’

‘Except… I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. Look, he forced his beastly attentions on several of the maids. Clara, the parlourmaid, a high-spirited colt of a girl, long legs, long nose – prettier than I’m making her sound, though – got the worst of it, since she, as she put it, “fell”.’ I saw Alec’s puzzled frown and translated. ‘Was made with-child, darling, which – at Pip’s insistence, I should add – she successfully concealed with tightened corsets and bigger aprons.’

‘Really? Is that possible?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.

‘And what happened to… it?’

‘It was stillborn. She crept off on her own to the attics, Alec, and never told a soul.’

‘Dear God.’

‘He also pounced on Eldry, the tweenie,’ I continued. ‘Rather an unfortunate girl. Pitifully plain, all bones and teeth. Edith Sitwell, except that she arranges her hair like a character from Beatrix Potter and so only draws attention to herself. Also Millie, the scullerymaid, truly a character from Beatrix Potter – round and pink and guileless, and by the way absolutely besotted by the most unattractive young man – Stanley, the footman.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Fastidious,’ I said. ‘Faints at the sight of blood or the mention of it.’

‘He can’t help that,’ said Alec.

‘Also pompous, boastful, ostentatiously servile, insinuating and sanctimonious. I’d love to be able to suspect him, but no one who pales at a drop of blood on a pricked finger could have wielded that mutton knife, you know. And no one who wasn’t innocent would dare to drone on so about what he knows and could tell.’

‘What does he know?’ said Alec. ‘What could he tell?’

‘Nothing, he’s just one of those annoying hinters. He had good reason to revile Pip, all the same. Pip refused him leave to visit his father when everyone thought he was just about to peg out from TB. And threatened him with the sack if he went AWOL. And he’d do it too, because Phyllis, the housemaid – she of the pawnshop visit – was on warning for cheek and would have been out on her ear if Pip hadn’t died. That was Phyllis’s particular complaint. She can’t even say, with any certainty, what it was she did, so one suspects she did nothing.’

‘He just wanted rid of her? What’s she like?’

‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Little impish, freckly thing with those very round blue eyes. Irish, perhaps.’

‘Doesn’t sound like the kind of girl one would cast easily aside,’ said Alec, with rather unguarded honesty it seemed to me. ‘Do you really believe she can’t think what she did? Clumsiness? Breaking the Meissen? Pilfering? Corrupting the grocer’s boy?’

‘Well, pilfering is a possibility,’ I said. ‘I never did manage to work out where she got that seventeen pounds, after all.’

‘That’s not pilfering,’ said Alec. ‘That’s theft. Fingers as sticky as all that would have got her much more than a warning.’

‘Yes, but I wondered if perhaps she was in the habit of a little very minor pinching – the pawnbroker thought the rug and nightie – and then after Pip’s death she swooped in and pocketed the seventeen pounds she knew was lying around.’

‘But that would be senseless,’ Alec said. ‘To do something to draw suspicion towards one when one knew there would be policemen sniffing about.’

It did sound unlikely when he put it that way.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps she did it to get the rug and nightie back, in case there was a search and they were missed. And then found. In the pawnbroker’s.’

This sounded even less convincing and Alec was kind enough to pass on without commenting.

‘So that’s the young girls,’ he said. ‘And Stanley.’

‘So let’s have the rest of the men. Mr Faulds is more discreet about Pip’s deeds than the rest but he didn’t hide his feelings for a minute. Good news about the death, let’s all stand together and what’s next, was the order of the day.’

‘Who’s Mr Faulds?’ said Alec.

‘Oh! The butler,’ I said. ‘Faulds. Ernest. He’s a dear. He lays down the law to the youngsters when he remembers but his heart isn’t in it. Mostly he hands out drinks and instigates sing-songs. He has a music-hall background, you know, and is teaching young Mattie to play the piano. Now, Mattie is the hall boy, also a dear. White-blond hair, deep dimples and a stammer when he’s nervous. He comes from a family of miners but had to give it up after an accident. Can you imagine, Alec, being trapped down a mine for hours? It’s left him with a crippling fear of being alone in the dark and yet Balfour – blister that he was – insisted on Mattie waiting up in the dark hall to let his master in on late nights out. Similarly, John the chauffeur was left to sleep in the car countless times when Balfour might easily have organised for him to have a bed wherever. And he’s the usual strapping type that people employ as chauffeurs too – not built for curling up on the back seat. And as for Harry, Balfour’s valet – well, there the tricks begin to get so silly they seem quite mad. Balfour stole the poor chap’s clothes and gave them back with the pockets cut out.’

‘Eh?’ said Alec.

‘I know. It’s like something from a fairy tale. But actually, it makes some kind of sense when one considers that Harry is the resident communist.’

‘Does it?’

‘Well, you know, can’t really make a fuss about his possessions since he thinks no one should have any.’

‘A communist valet,’ said Alec, as wonderingly as I had. ‘Rather an odd choice of occupation, isn’t it? Odd enough to be suspicious, do you think?’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten someone. Faulds, Harry, John, Stanley, Mattie. Clara, Phyllis, Eldry, Millie and… Oh! Mrs Hepburn. Of course. Kitty Hepburn, the cook.’

‘Interfered with like the rest of the girls?’ said Alec.

‘Not by Balfour,’ I said. ‘But she and Faulds have a bit of an understanding. In fact, they were together on the night in question and provided one another with alibis.’

‘So does she have some other reason to have loathed Balfour?’

With a shudder I told him about the dead mouse in the goose and the other insults to her cooking.

‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘It’s nasty – especially the mouse, which you might easily have kept to yourself, Dandy; I may never eat roast goose again – but it’s better than what happened to all the young ones.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s the thing, Alec. One of the many things. It didn’t.’ Alec waited, eyebrows up and head cocked to one side. ‘It didn’t happen to all the girls. It didn’t happen to Phyllis. The prettiest one and one who – as housemaid – would have been in and out of the family rooms all day every day and would have been readily… well, accessible, I suppose, if that weren’t a repugnant thing to say.’

‘And yet, Edith Sitwell…’ said Alec.

‘Eldry, yes. Far less attractive and – since she was the tweenie – hardly ever in any place where Pip Balfour could pounce on her except in the early mornings to light the fires. Not to mention Millie, who was never anywhere he could easily have found her. She spends her days in the scullery with the cook – her Auntie Kitty, no less – planted in the kitchen between Millie and the rest of the world.’

‘Auntie Kitty?’ said Alec. ‘Is that a term of affection?’

‘Well, Mrs Hepburn is kind to all of them, but she is actually Millie’s aunt.’

‘And yet she brought her niece into a household where the master was known to be a ravager of maidens and kept her there?’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Another thing that makes no sense at all. As well as the question of how he got close enough to Eldry and Millie and, in poor Eldry’s case, why? And if Eldry then why not Phyllis? And… and…’

‘What?’ said Alec. ‘What is it? You’re having one of your ideas, Dandy, I can tell. Start speaking before it goes away again.’

‘Shut up before you chase it away!’ I said. ‘It was what I just said about how he got close enough to the girls to… Aha! That’s it. It’s Mattie. How on earth would the master of the house come to know that the hall boy was afraid of the dark? How could that be? What do you know of your hall boy’s fears and demons, Alec? Hm?’

‘I don’t have a hall boy,’ said Alec. ‘What about you?’

‘Well, hall, boots and under-footman combined,’ I said. ‘And all I know is that his name is George and he sniffs. Do you see?’

‘I do,’ Alec said. ‘There’s something very odd about all of this.’

I was nodding furiously.

‘The story of the stolen clothes too,’ I said. ‘Even if Balfour got into the carriage house and out again with his valet’s clothes, where would he put them so that his valet couldn’t just take them back? Are we saying he hid them in the attics? Or got a luggage locker at the station or something? The whole story just makes no sense.’

‘No more sense than the idea of a communist sympathiser being a valet in the first place,’ Alec said. ‘This Harry might be making up his story to fall in with the others. And doing a pretty poor job of it.’

‘But it’s not only Harry,’ I said. ‘That’s the point. It’s all of them. Take Stanley and his father.’

‘No, no, I must disagree with you there,’ said Alec. ‘That little tale was only too believable. Oh, what is it?’ I had clearly been unable to prevent a look of smug triumph from spreading over me.

‘Just this. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that Stanley would have gone within a mile of someone with consumption. Stanley? Clamouring to go to the bedside of someone coughing up blood into a hanky? Never. I mean, have you ever seen anyone with advanced TB?’

‘Of course I have,’ Alec said. ‘And I can imagine what it’s like to be stuck in a dark mine too. Except in my case it was a dark foxhole and it wasn’t TB making my sergeant cough up blood and he didn’t have a hanky either. And we were being shelled, just to add to the fun.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, reaching out and giving his arm a quick squeeze. Bunty put her paw up on my knee. If ever there are tokens of affection being handed out, she likes to make sure she gets one. ‘I had no idea. You never speak of it.’

‘Would you?’ Alec said. ‘But at least we got called heroes for it. And given medals and parades. Not like Mattie and his brethren – told to do it again, for longer hours and less pay, and called nasty names for objecting.’

‘Have I told you recently what a lovely man you are?’

‘You hardly ever tell me,’ said Alec. ‘And very sketchily when you do – no details. So Mattie has my commiserations for his long nights in the dark alone and even the chauffeur – nothing makes one as miserable as trying to sleep when one is really chilled to the bone.’

‘Hah!’ I said. Bunty took her paw back and sat with it in mid-air watching me.

‘A problem?’ asked Alec.

‘It’s all beginning to fall into place,’ I said. ‘Or out of it rather. I knew there was something wrong when John told me. And it’s this: Lollie said that she and Pip had only spent one night apart in all the time they were married and that was when he went to Paris in an aeroplane. Unless she’s lying I don’t see how he can have left John languishing in the motorcar all these times he’s supposed to have. And Lollie said something else to me in the same conversation. What was it? Oh, why don’t I write things down?’

Alec laughed, sharply enough to wake the placid Millie who was lying over his feet.

‘You?’ he said. ‘Not write things down? What, pray tell, is in that bulging article you’ve lugged along with you today?’ He nodded towards Miss Rossiter’s bag, which had a few corners of writing paper peeping out around its straining clasp.

‘Well, yes, all right, but I wish I could be like a policeman and keep my notebook on my knee, rather than having to store it all up until I’m alone again. She was talking about Pip and she said he never went away on his own and he… what?’

‘Would never snip the pockets out of other chaps’ clothes?’ Alec was teasing but I smiled and clapped my hands together.

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Well, almost. Thank you, darling. What she said was that he was no trouble, not fussy, never complained about anything.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, I’m thinking about his food, really. If a man sent back his dinners often enough to enrage his cook, how could his wife say he was easy-going? And do you know what else? When I mentioned the mouse in the goose-’

‘As you do with surprising regularity,’ said Alec. ‘Once would have been enough for me.’

‘Lollie didn’t know what I was talking about.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Would you forget it?’ I said. ‘Could someone mention mice and geese together to you ever again without you remembering?’

‘So,’ said Alec, nodding slowly to acknowledge my point, ‘what we’re saying is that we don’t actually believe a word that any of the servants said about him?’

‘And we don’t have any proof that Lollie’s story has a scrap of truth behind it either, when you get right down to things. And for what it’s worth, the two times I actually met Pip Balfour I couldn’t believe it was the man I’d been hearing about.’

‘But Lollie was scared enough to come to you,’ Alec said. ‘No, I think Mrs Balfour’s tale of threat and treachery is solid enough, just not any of the others. Dandy, what do you suppose is going on?’

Once again, I was counting off the residents of the servants’ hall on my fingers and did not answer him. Was that really true? Could it be? Had we argued away every single instance of Pip Balfour’s villainy in inconsistencies and implausibilities? Even that most likely, most everyday, villainy of lust and its brutal fulfilling? I did not believe that anyone who would ravage Eldry would overlook Phyllis, and I did not believe that Mrs Hepburn would let her niece stay in a house where the master had harmed her, but that still left one of them.

‘Clara,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to contradict what Clara said and what he’s supposed to have done to her is the easiest to believe and – oh God, Alec – it might be the easiest to check. Clara thinks she might have swaddled the baby and hidden it, up there in the nurseries. Lord, I’m going to have to look.’ I shuddered at the thought of it. ‘If someone had told me five years ago the kind of thing I’d find myself doing, I’d have-’

‘Thinks she might have?’ said Alec, interrupting me. ‘What do you mean? Doesn’t she know? If she can’t keep her story straight why should we believe her?’

‘She was in extremis,’ I said. ‘She has a vague idea that she went to the furnace but she also seems to remember hiding a wrapped bundle. Neither memory is clear, under the dreadful circumstances.’

‘Well, I suppose I can sympathise with that,’ said Alec, and I thought of the foxhole again.

‘She might have done both, one after the other,’ I said, ‘or she might have hidden the little body and burned soiled sheets. And anyway, her confusion – her derangement – makes it all the more likely that she could have been turned murderous. Yes, I’m sure of it. I think what Clara told me was true.’

‘And… what? The others made up all the rest of it like a haystack to hide the needle in? In advance? Because they knew that she was going to kill him and they supported her? But if he was not the fiend to them all that they said he was why would they?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And why in the name of heaven didn’t she just leave? Before the baby, after the baby, whenever. Why didn’t they all just leave? Why, if any of what they say is true, is there a single servant left in the place?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d got somewhere, but it’s only made the whole thing more mysterious than ever. If the stories are true, why didn’t they leave? If the stories aren’t true, why didn’t they care that Pip was murdered? And could Clara have done it? The police surgeon reckoned it was a man and Clara has anything but masculine hands.’ We sat in silence for a while. ‘Although, it’s not true to say that no one ever left,’ I said at last. ‘Maggie the kitchenmaid left and Miss Abbott who was Miss Rossiter’s predecessor took off too.’

‘So what was different about them? What did he do to them that’s worse than the fates of the others?’

‘I don’t know what was done to them. But they are different, in point of fact. They witnessed Pip Balfour’s will. And let me tell you, Alec, the will is another barrel of eels altogether.’

‘A barrel of eels?’

‘Isn’t that the phrase? A sack of monkeys? A box of worms?’

‘Dandy, you’re gibbering,’ Alec said. ‘Tell me about the will.’

Five days I had been in the servants’ hall at 31 Heriot Row but it had changed me. I could not, I told Alec, contemplate even beginning on the will without a pot of strong tea and a plate of buns, thickly buttered and spread with jam. I only regretted that I had no hip flask with me from which to slop in a good dose of something more strengthening still.