The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

12

Crawford’s tearooms were doing brisk trade, as might be expected on a Friday afternoon when all the public houses had been closed, and we had to wait, shuffling forward in the queue every few minutes and trying to ignore the plaintive moans of Bunty and Millie who had been left tied to a lamp post but who could still see us and, more importantly, could smell cakes. We could not even carry on a conversation of any usefulness while so many silent fellow queuers pressed in on us before and behind. At least the pause gave me time to compose my report, though, and when we were finally shown to our place I was ready.

‘Sorry about the table, sir,’ said the waitress, peeping up at Alec and smiling. She had swept one practised glance over me and had clearly concluded that Alec was free to be simpered at. ‘But it’s all we’ve got.’ The table was indeed small, in a far from commanding position at the side of the empty band stage and, I noticed as I sat, none too steady on its feet.

‘Not at all,’ said Alec. ‘This is perfect. Exactly what we’re after.’

The waitress, thinking she had misjudged the matter – for why would anyone want to be so secluded except for wooing – gave me a look of insulted envy, Alec one of pity and flounced away.

‘You should have flirted back,’ I said. ‘She’ll pretend to have forgotten us now.’

‘Good,’ said Alec. ‘Now then, Dandy.’

I told him everything; all about George Pollard and Josephine Carson, the two years’ delay, the break-up of the household and the casting of Lollie into the harsh, cruel world.

‘Golly,’ he said, when I was done. ‘Is someone checking it? The earlier marriage, I mean. And has this Pollard been found?’

‘I’d be very surprised if he let himself be found,’ I replied. ‘I rather think he must have done it. With the help – of course – of what the spy stories call “someone on the inside”.’

‘If he knew,’ said Alec.

‘Ah, but I think he did,’ I said. I was still feeling rather proud of this piece of deduction. ‘I think that at the very least he was in touch with Pip Balfour, that they had met and spoken. They were cousins, but not long-lost ones – or if they had been they’d found one another again.’

‘Because of the high esteem and all that,’ said Alec.

‘Well, that’s part of it,’ I said, trying not to look crestfallen, ‘but also – and this has only just occurred to me – because he left the fortune to George Pollard outright. Just to him. Not to his heirs and successors and there was no mention of what would happen if Pollard was no more.’ Alec was frowning at me. ‘I mean to say, darling, if you were to leave your last penny to someone you’d have to know that he was still alive to get it.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense at all,’ Alec said. ‘You’ve been misled by hindsight, Dan. You’re thinking about it in entirely the wrong way.’

Of course, it was at that moment that the waitress reappeared with her little notebook to take our order. I was vaguely aware of Alec listing our requirements but even though I left it to him and thought furiously I could still see no problem in my reasoning by the time she had gone.

‘Oh come on, Dandy, this isn’t worthy of you,’ he said when he turned back and saw my knitted brows. ‘Why didn’t Pip Balfour bother with survivorship and all that?’

‘Because he knew Pollard was alive and well,’ I said. ‘I told you.’ We stared at one another in silence for a minute until Alec gave in.

‘And knew that Pollard would still be alive and well when he himself died because he knew he’d be dying soon?’ I could feel the flush beginning and did not even bother trying to hide it. Besides, I was soon distracted from my embarrassment by the new puzzle Alec had unearthed out of the old one.

‘So… why would he have written it that way?’ I said. Alec shrugged his shoulders.

‘Makes no sense to me,’ he said. ‘Seems completely insane.’

‘And therefore completely in character,’ I said. ‘Another of Pip Balfour’s silly little teases? Did he mean for Lollie to find out about the will and spend her life worrying over it? If so, we’re back to the theory that George Pollard – not to mention Josephine Carson – doesn’t exist at all.’

‘But we just decided we didn’t believe in Pip’s teases, didn’t we?’

‘And I was sure that this George Pollard character must have got into the house and done the murder.’

We were sitting in blank stupefaction when our tea tray arrived and the little waitress looked delighted; she must have thought our tryst had descended into a quarrel.

‘Oh, heaven!’ I said, as Alec poured a thin stream of straw-coloured China tea into my cup. ‘Mrs Hepburn’s brews could be eaten with a knife and fork. And no milk, thanks. No, no sugar, nothing.’ I blew into my cup, took a long fragrant sip and smiled at him.

‘What about these two maids who witnessed it?’ Alec said at last. ‘Perhaps they’d be able to throw some light on matters?’

‘How?’ I said, remembering what Mr Faulds had thought about the unlikelihood of them seeing anything except the signature itself.

‘I don’t know,’ Alec said. ‘I’m casting around for anything, really. Odd that they should both have left, though. If they knew what was in the will and they knew George Pollard – from his coming to the house, perhaps – and one of them told Pollard for a cut of the money…’

‘But he didn’t come to the house,’ I said. ‘None of the servants remember ever hearing of him. And anyway, if Miss Abbott or Maggie had done that, they’d never have left. They’d have stayed. To let Pollard in. Because someone must have. No, I think the fact that the witnesses both left their jobs is far more suggestive of the will being a joke on Lollie. Pip wasn’t ready for her to find out and he made a concerted effort to get rid of the two people who could tell her that he’d written a new will in case she somehow persuaded the solicitor to let her see it.’

‘And he wrote it in March,’ Alec said. ‘Is that significant? Did anything happen in March?’ I shrugged. ‘And what was he waiting for, do you suppose? When was he going to tell Lollie about it? Was there some significant time to do that for any reason?’ I shrugged again.

‘Was there any significant timing in any of it?’ I said, and then I stopped chewing my mouthful of bread-and-butter.

‘Dandy?’

‘Yes,’ I said, through crumbs, ‘there was. Miss Abbott and Maggie witnessed the will. Miss Abbott left Lollie shortly afterwards. Maggie left on Saturday. Pip was killed sometime during Monday night, as soon as both witnesses were out of the house. I’ve no idea what it means but it can’t be a coincidence, surely.’

‘Well, they must be found,’ Alec said. ‘All three of them. Abbott, Maggie and Pollard.’

‘If there is such a person,’ I reminded him. ‘He’s popping in and out of existence like a jack-in-the-box.’ I put my elbows on the table and my head into my hands and groaned. ‘I thought you’d clear everything up for me! I thought if I got up into the air and talked it all through, things would be revealed in simple outline. And you’ve only made it madder and more confusing than ever and – worst of all – I know there’s something not right that I was closer to realising before today than I am now. I almost got it lying in bed last night, or was it this morning? It’s something to do with lying in bed anyway. Now it’s completely gone.’

‘What do you mean, “up into the air”?’ said Alec, which was very kind of him, for he might easily have taken offence at my sharing out of the blame in the way I had.

‘Hm?’ I said. ‘Oh, just life below stairs, you know. I hadn’t expected it to feel so literal, but to eat and work and sleep in a sub-basement with a whole house pressing down upon one is not conducive to leaps of reason. I just think if I could climb a high hill and look down I’d be able to see more.’

‘Well,’ said Alec, ‘I don’t think we can manage a hill, but we can certainly get you up into the air. Look, you wrap two cakes in your hanky and I’ll wrap two in mine.’

‘Four cakes?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have any luncheon?’

‘One each,’ said Alec. ‘You – as befits the boss of this little outfit – have been marvellously focused but I’m far more easily distracted and I can’t stand it any more. Listen.’

When I did, I could hear the duet from the pavement: low, sustained howling and a series of percussive little yips.

‘She’s a very bad influence on Millie,’ said Alec, grinning. ‘Come on, let’s take them up the Scott Monument and tire them out for the evening.’

The Scott Monument – erected in honour of Sir Walter specifically and not, as I had long believed, to the general and misspelled glory of the Scots race – was a kind of airy turret in High Victorian Gothic style, not attached to anything but just rising up out of the grass as though some ecclesiastical architect had lavished all of his attention on the decorative touches but forgotten to build the cathedral itself. ‘Better than the Albert Memorial’ was the best one could say about it, and it was smaller, too – and sooty black, like everything in Edinburgh which cannot brush itself down or send itself to the laundry – so at least it did not draw the eye.

I had never climbed up it before, had in fact congratulated myself on not letting my sons find out that one could (for they would have badgered me to death on every shopping trip if they had known), and should have realised, from the fact that I had never noticed anyone else scaling its heights, that the staircases were hidden away at its core. As Alec, Bunty, Millie and I toiled up the darkest, narrowest, steepest spiral staircase imaginable, breathing in the sharp stink of damp, tarry stone, I could not help thinking that I could have reproduced the experience in the six floors of Number 31 in far greater comfort, and saved my sixpence.

‘I’m expecting a helter-skelter at the end of all this,’ said Alec, sounding rather out of breath, and I laughed. We had arrived at the first landing and while Alec investigated the little room in the centre I paraded the terrace which wrapped around it. At least, I tried to; one could not actually walk all the way round because at one corner there was a door blocking the way.

‘It’s locked,’ I called to Alec.

‘Probably a cupboard,’ he replied, but I had crouched down to peer into the keyhole and I could see light.

‘No, it goes through,’ I said and rattled the handle. ‘It’s certainly locked though. I wonder why.’

‘Never mind, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘There’s air and light as requested.’

‘Not nearly enough,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Let’s go up again.’

The staircases got even steeper and narrower as they rose and by the time we stepped out onto the little terrace at the crow’s nest I did indeed feel a lift in my spirits to be looking across the rooftops at a far horizon instead of out of my barred window at the cherry tree.

‘I think I might be missing Perthshire,’ I said. ‘I think after all these years of distant forests and hilltops it’s finally got to me.’

‘Right,’ said Alec, who was still at the top of the stairway, examining the stonework and ignoring the panorama. ‘Now that you’re up here looking down,’ – at this he gulped – ‘what do you see?’

‘Well, give me a minute,’ I said, ‘it’s not like putting a penny in a slot machine and getting a bar of chocolate.’ I craned around the corner, trying to see beyond a jutting buttress. ‘You must get a good view to the Old Town too.’ I put my foot on a kind of stone skirting board and hoisted myself up.

‘Dandy, do be careful,’ said Alec, and put a firm hand around my arm, squeezing really quite tightly. ‘There’s a pathway round – you don’t have to clamber.’ I looked down at him. His lips had disappeared and although he had not looked tired a moment ago there was now a purple patch under each eye.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘You look very peculiar.’

‘Heights,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘I always forget. Now for God’s sake come down, or I shall faint and you’ll have to roll me down all those stairs again.’

I hopped down and stood beside him, feet squarely planted, while his colour returned to normal.

‘Now, please try to concentrate,’ he said. ‘You told me this idea was in reach when you were lying in bed. Is it about Pip’s bedroom? Something you saw near his bed? Something out of place in Lollie’s bedroom?’

‘Hush,’ I said. I was looking down at the view again now, at the long empty street, its tramlines shining like snail trails, and the few people scurrying about on the pavement, all looking very similar under their hats from up here. I could not tell which of the rooftops was 31 Heriot Row, for the fronts of the houses were hidden behind the trees of Queen Street Gardens, but I trained my gaze at where I thought the house must be and thought hard. I almost had it. I could almost touch it, just out of reach.

‘Say it,’ said Alec, very loudly in my ear.

‘Say what?’ I said. ‘Alec, I’m trying very hard to think and you’re making it harder.’

‘I was trying to help,’ he said. ‘I thought if you just blurted something out perhaps it would turn out to be the clue that unlocks it all. Psychology, you know.’

‘The locked door,’ I said. Alec tutted but I shoved him to shut him up. ‘Not the one downstairs. I mean, The Locked Door. In general. That’s what this case would be called if it were Sherlock Holmes’s. The case of the locked door. That’s what I hear last thing at night and first thing in the morning, lying in my bed; Mr Faulds, locking the doors. And Pip locked his bedroom door. And Lollie can’t sleep in a room with a locked door. And the mews door was locked in the daytime and one assumes that the back mews door – the garden door – was locked up at night. And Mattie had to stay in the vestibule to open the locked front door for his master and then lock it again after him. There’s something about all these locked doors.’

‘How would he get out?’ said Alec. ‘On the late nights, I mean.’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose he went out earlier, when the house was still open or at least when Faulds or Stanley were still about.’

‘No, not Pip,’ Alec said. ‘The hall boy cowering in the dark. What’s his name? Mattie. After he let Balfour in, how would he get out to go to bed in the carriage house?’

I leaned over and kissed him roundly first on one cheek and then on the other.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Alec, you are a genius. That is it. How did Mattie get through a locked and bolted door in the night? That’s what’s been pricking at me.’ I beamed at Alec but his answering smile was so uncertain as to be hardly deserving of the name. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, most unconvincingly, ‘only hadn’t we agreed that the story of waiting in the hall wasn’t true? No more true than the TB visit or the trouser pockets or, indeed, the will? I mean, it’s good to have these loose ends cleared up but it doesn’t get us anywhere we hadn’t got already.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, and put my hand up to stem the tide of argument which began. ‘I know. I know what we said, but Mattie certainly knows something, I’m sure he does. Clara, Phyllis and Mattie. When I asked them all about locked doors and people creeping around in the night yesterday dinner-time the two girls stared at me as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths and missed poor Mattie trying to catch their eyes to see if he should speak up or stay silent.’

‘Well, those three would be rather jumpy, wouldn’t they,’ Alec said. ‘If Clara’s story is the only real one and the other two are just made up.’

‘Although, to be fair, John was discomfited too, Stanley squirmed like a worm on a hook, and Millie and Eldry blushed to the roots of their hair.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Alec. ‘Are you absolutely sure you weren’t imagining things? Or wait: perhaps they were all staring and blushing because they had heard the cook and butler creeping around in the night and couldn’t believe you were being so indelicate as to ask about it.’

‘I’m still going to lean very hard on Mattie,’ I said. ‘Those two girls are as tricky as a bag of knives – Lord, I simply cannot remember that expression! – but Mattie is the weak spot. If I manage to get him on his own he’ll never be able to hold firm against me.’

‘You sound very fierce,’ said Alec. ‘I’m glad it’s not me keeping secrets. What can I do to help you, here on the outside, as it were?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ I replied. ‘Find the missing persons. In case – as I fear – the police get nowhere with it. Start with George Pollard.’

‘No such man,’ said Alec.

‘Well, check at least. And the same for Josephine Carson. That should be easy enough. There will be a marriage certificate and Pip was twenty-six so you’ll only have to look through about eight years’ worth at the very most.’

‘Oh, so breezy when it’s not you!’ said Alec. ‘Only eight years’ worth indeed. What if they weren’t married in Scotland? How am I supposed to get to London to Somerset House? On a donkey? And what if they were married abroad?’

‘Maggie and Miss Abbott then,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask Lollie where the lady’s maid moved on to but I know that Maggie went to North Berwick to work for a baronet. She should be easy enough to find.’

‘North Berwick?’ said Alec. ‘Might as well be the North Pole right now.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Harry told me this morning that there’s petrol to be had again. He was complaining, of course, saying that “that toad Churchill” – not kind but not inaccurate either – has got soldiers delivering petrol all over the big towns. Actually, he was saying that there are vans marked “Petrol” delivering – oh, I don’t know – larks’ tongues and long-stemmed roses, but there must be some petrol getting through too. Enough for North Berwick, anyway.’

‘So what are we doing rambling around public parks and up and down monuments then?’ said Alec, heading for the top of the stairs as though there were not a moment to lose.

‘I didn’t know Maggie and Miss Abbott were crucial before we talked it all through,’ I reminded him.

‘Can’t think why,’ he said. He was plunging ahead, already out of sight, and surprisingly for one with a fear of heights he seemed to have no qualms about racing down a dark, twisting staircase with a lively spaniel tugging him to go even faster. I, on the other hand, had never been more sorry for Bunty’s poor training and when she had almost pulled me off my feet for the second time I am afraid that I unclipped her lead and let her slither down to catch up Alec and Millie, with only a ‘Watch out!’ to warn of her arrival.

I was returning early, thanks to Alec’s eager departure, and turning the corner of Heriot Row I met Clara sauntering towards me, swinging a duffel bag. She stopped when she saw me.

‘You’re back sharp,’ she said. ‘Are you no’ feeling well?’

‘Just run out of things to do,’ I said. ‘I’ve no family to visit and my friend that I was meeting had to go.’ She gave me a pitying look at that; one surmised that she would never run out of amusements on a May afternoon. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘The baths,’ said Clara. ‘It’s not my day or anything but Mrs Hepburn said I could go. My afternoon free is on a men’s day, see? So I’d never get there else.’

‘Mrs Hepburn is very kind to you all,’ I said. I had fallen in with Clara and was walking away from the house again.

‘Are you…?’ Clara began, eyeing me warily. ‘Are you chumming me, Miss Rossiter?’

‘If you don’t mind,’ I said. Clara gave a tight smile and said nothing. She could not have sent a stronger signal that she dreaded Miss Rossiter’s awkward questions if she had tried.

‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘but they don’t hire out towels. You can borrow mine, though.’ I laughed and shook my head.

‘I don’t have a bathing suit with me,’ I said.

‘Oh, they hire out costumes,’ she said. I tried not to show what I thought of this idea.

‘Yes, a very kindly soul is our Mrs Hepburn,’ I said again. ‘I’m not surprised that Mr Faulds is captivated, are you?’

Clara had one of those faces upon which every thought passing through her mind is played out. Now, an impish amusement and natural taste for gossip fought with an equally natural suspicion (and disapproval) over an upper servant like me sucking my teeth with a lower servant like her about my equals and her betters. Or perhaps the disapproval was for two such ancient persons as Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds giving in to passion.

‘Well, I was surprised, Miss Rossiter, to be honest,’ she said. ‘They’ve been awfy discreet. And I thought I could tell when Mr Faulds liked a girl – you know – that way. I mean, he’s always had a right soft spot for Phyllis and he never hid it better than a boil on his-’

‘Nose?’ I said quickly. The usual expression had always struck me as rather nonsensical; a boil where Clara had just been about to place one is hidden for much of the time in the ordinary way of things.

‘Miss Rossiter, you’re terrible,’ she said. ‘I thought when you first turned up you were a right old stick-in-the-mud.’

‘It’s my face,’ I said. ‘And these clothes, but I assure you I’m not, dear.’

We tramped on for a while, down sweeping crescents and along endless quiet rows of tall houses, until it occurred to me to wonder where we were heading. After all, Mattie was set to walk nine miles to his village on the morrow.

‘Where exactly are these baths?’

‘Glenogle,’ said Clara. ‘Stockbridge. We’re nearly there.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Miss Rossiter?’ I waited, trying not to perk up too visibly. ‘Do you really think they’ll put mistress out? And the rest of us? Mr Faulds says no.’

Now, in truth, Alec and I had all but decided that the will was nonsense and would not stand, but if Clara needed an incentive to do her duty, then my duty was clear.

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid. Unless the police can catch the man who did this – if it’s Cousin George, that is – then it’s a grim lookout for all of us.’

‘Poor mistress,’ Clara said. ‘Poor us an’ all. I’ll never get another parlourmaid’s job in a house with all that company. Not in Edinburgh, anyway.’

‘No indeed,’ I agreed. ‘I shall be very lucky to be a lady’s maid and not a cook-general.’

‘Can you cook, then?’ said Clara. ‘I cannae even do that. I’ll end up in a factory. Or a shop. Living back at my mammy’s in the middle of nowhere. She ayeways said that Balfour job was too good to be true.’

‘Let’s hope that someone saw something and will speak up, then,’ I said trying to sound like justice raining unstoppably down, but only succeeding in sounding like Nanny.

‘I suppose,’ said Clara, ‘but even if it brings no good to mistress or to me, I just can’t see myself helping to punish whoever killed him. I’d have killed him myself if I’d thought of it. And I just don’t give a-’

‘Tinker’s cuss?’ I said.

‘You have a wonderful way with words, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘As good as Mr Faulds when he gets his music-hall patter going.’

‘But you’re not protecting anyone in particular, Clara, are you?’

‘Like who?’ said Clara.

‘It might not be that you saw someone covered in blood leaving master’s room, you know,’ I said. ‘It could be something else entirely. Someone who perhaps… oh, let’s say… suddenly had extra money she – or he, of course – shouldn’t have.’

‘What money?’ said Clara. ‘Where does money come into it?’

‘Well, if someone opened the door up to let George Pollard into the house, she – or he, of course – might have been paid for it. That’s all.’

Clara had stopped walking and turned to face me. ‘But no one could open a door without somebody else hearing,’ she said.

‘True,’ I said. I looked along the street and then back at her, standing there in front of me like a statue. ‘Shall we go on?’

‘We’re here,’ said Clara. ‘This is it. Come in and have a wee look. See if you fancy it for another time.’

We were on one of those Edinburgh streets, of which since the city clings to the side of a steep hill there are many, where sunlight never reaches down between its high walls and the road is carved deep like a fissure. To the natural darkness was added an extra measure of gloom from the dark, red stone of the baths, mossy and wearing little sprouts of fern like buttonholes here and there. Inside, beyond the turnstile, the tiled passageways were just as dark and even damper and smelled of floor soap and chlorine. The chlorine, at least, was a smell which had nothing but happy memories for me, making me think of lidos in the south of France and a hotel Hugh and I had stayed in once in Italy which, despite the endless sunshine, had a covered swimming pond under a glass roof beyond its foyer – for the Italians, one supposed, who could find it too chilly for the sea and could look glamorous in cashmere wraps when I and the other Englishwomen were hot and red in limp cotton frocks with our waves melting.

The pool at Glenogle was under a glass roof of its own, but was otherwise as unlike the pond at the Miramalfi as my own tin bath before my bedroom fire at home. Wooden changing cubicles were ranged up and down its sides, most of their doors left open onto inelegant heaps of discarded clothes and, on hooks outside them, the kind of demoted bath towels – thin and grubby – that mothers hand out to children to take swimming. In the pool itself, a flotilla of girls and women bobbed around looking, in their rubberised bathing hats with the straps firmly buckled under their chins, like a squadron of pilots after an unfortunate water landing.

Clara disappeared into an empty cubicle and pulled the door closed behind her. I sat down on one of the wooden folding chairs laid out for spectators and prepared to wait and then to watch Clara for a polite few minutes before leaving but, when an arc of water sent up by some athletic girl diving in a few feet away from me soaked my skirt through, I thought the better of hanging around at all. I could see Clara’s head over the door of her cubicle and, since she was already wearing her cap – dark red and most unbecoming, I surmised that she had finished changing and went over to say goodbye to her. When I popped my head over the door, however, it was to discover that, to my horror, she had put her hat on first and was only now struggling into her suit, had in dreadful fact only got it unrolled as far as her hips. I stepped back very sharply, almost skidding on the wet floor.

‘Oh my dear! I do apologise. How dreadful you must think me.’

‘Eh?’ said Clara, peering out at me over the top of the door, her bare shoulders just visible. ‘Why? What have you done?’

‘I – um – I didn’t mean, that is, well, if you are not the modest sort, then nothing. Forgive me.’ Clara only laughed and shook her head and I felt all of a sudden very old. I remembered clearly the river bathing with my sister at home, as naked as eels in the sunshine, and the late-night sessions in the dorms at finishing school in Paris with Daisy and Freddy, which we spent ‘trying on’: trying on one another’s dresses and shoes and nightgowns and even underclothes, for my own calico shifts and knickers – my mother’s penchant for Nature stopped at no threshold – sent the other two into shrieks of laughter as they paraded up and down in them and I, of course, thrilled to the unaccustomed touch of machine lace and milanaise as I modelled theirs. But it had been years since anyone except Grant had witnessed my dressing and undressing, and she with a sheet held high between us and her face turned away from the sight of me, and I had forgotten the easy ways of girls.

I had not, however, forgotten everything about girls. I had not forgotten what they looked like, and as I left the echoing hall and the damp corridors and re-emerged onto the Glenogle Road I was slowly coming to terms with what I had just seen in the changing cubicle. That girl, Clara, had never had a child. She had the untried, untrammelled body of a child herself, a bud, still waiting for flowering and fruitfulness but untouched by it so far.

And so, I thought to myself as I paced along, not one single one of the stories of Pip Balfour’s treachery was left standing.

I listened at Lollie’s boudoir door for a long time before knocking, thinking that if Mr Hardy were not in there I would rather not announce myself and get embroiled with Great Aunt Goitre. It was impossible to tell, however, whether anyone else was in there with the lady: her voice boomed on and on, asking no questions and pausing for no replies. She might have been talking to her own extraordinary reflection in the glass, for all one could say. When at last I tapped and entered, though, she did draw breath.

‘Knocking on doors, Walburga?’ she said in tones of high astonishment. ‘Where do you find these servants of yours?’ Lollie did not reply (from her wan face and unfocused gaze I could guess that the endless pronouncements and rambling anecdotes had long since beaten her into hopeless silence). Of course, I could not come back with a retort although I had to bite my cheeks to prevent one, for a boudoir on the bedroom floor is not a public reception room and knocking on its door is perfectly proper. I scowled at Great Aunt Goitre who, unfortunately, saw me.

‘And don’t you give me that kind of look, young woman,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I was saying, Walburga, my point in a nutshell. The very reason I’ve always resisted hiring a companion. The only ones I’ve ever come across are pert and lazy and I’m not the woman to pay good money and see nothing for it.’

‘No, Aunt,’ said Lollie.

‘So you see, when you come to make your home with me we shall both be the better for it,’ continued Great Aunt Gertrude. ‘And I shan’t expect any more than the most ordinary gratitude. Nor shall I be selfish, my dear.’ Here she gave a simpering little smile, quite horrid to behold. ‘I still move in the highest Episcopalian circles and there’s many a curate and vicar sent overseas all alone who’d be happy to have a steady wife along with him.’

I cleared my throat and broke into the stream then, thinking that I had to crack that will and save Lollie from such a future.

‘Can you tell me where Superintendent Hardy is, madam?’ I said.

‘Pip’s room,’ whispered Lollie. I bobbed and opened the door to leave.

‘Oh, and… can you tell me, madam, where did Miss Abbott go when she left? Do you know?’

‘What? What?’ said Great Aunt Gertrude, unable to bear having to listen to snippets of conversation she could not join.

‘Abbott?’ said Lollie. ‘Why…?’

‘I have some of her belongings to send on,’ I said.

‘Can’t you ask one of the other maids?’ said her aunt, almost at a roar. ‘Where were you trained, girl?’

‘Mrs Ruthven,’ Lollie said to me, ignoring her aunt. ‘In the Braids.’

I entered Pip’s bedroom with some diffidence, expecting to find the superintendent standing there, communing with the spirit of the dead and hoping for inspiration, and unsure whether he would want a witness while he did so. The room, though, was empty, the bed bare, even the mattress gone. I shivered, not just from the cold – the window was thrown wide to air the place – but because ever since the wards a stripped bed means death and looks both pitiful and brutal in its bareness, conceding defeat and moving hygienically on to other things.

I finally ran Hardy to ground in Pip’s other room, the library on the first floor, following the scent of his cigarette smoke and finding him seated behind a desk which was strewn with papers he was studiously ignoring. He lay back in the chair and blew smoke straight up at the ceiling.

‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said, looking down his nose and making great exhausted-sounding hisses out of both parts of my assumed name.

‘Mr Hardy,’ I said. ‘How goes the investigation? Have you discovered anything new? Have you found a George Pollard?’

‘Hah,’ said the superintendent. ‘A George Pollard? A George Pollard. I found six and then I stopped looking.’

‘Where?’ I said. He clearly thought that the unearthing of six suspects was an embarrassment of riches, but to my mind having only six suspects when that morning we suspected the population at large was a great stride forward.

‘Well, when I say I’ve found them, I mean I’ve found their names. Found out that they exist. But not in Gloucester. Oh, no, that would be far too easy. Where did I put my notes?’ He stirred the papers on the desk with his pen and picked out a loose sheet covered in inky scribbles. His neat notebook was forgotten, it seemed. ‘Now then. Balfour’s great great great great grandfather, James-’

‘The banker?’ I said.

‘Just so,’ said Hardy. ‘He had a brother who moved away to take care of one of the family’s many business interests, and this brother had a daughter who married a Pollard and had a son named George. This George Pollard had a George of his own, as well as a Philip, who himself had a son named after his brother: George.’

‘But they’ll all be long dead, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘You just need to follow the pieces of string to the end and see where they lead you.’ He was shaking his head, and so I subsided.

‘George’s George had a George to go with Philip’s George – these are second cousins, now, same generation as Balfour’s grandfather although older since the original daughter married her Pollard very young – and between them they had a pair of Philips and a pair of Jameses too, and every James and Philip and George in time had a George of his own. Making six George Pollards in total who could all be called cousins of Philip Balfour. They’re every age between seventy and forty-five. All married, none dead yet as far as I can tell.’ He threw the paper down. ‘I’m used to facts being a help to me,’ he said. ‘I can’t be doing with this – it’s like a comic operetta.’

‘And what about the next generation?’ I said. ‘Surely six married Georges must have had some sons.’

‘They did,’ said Hardy. ‘Three. Including two Georges.’

‘Just two?’ I said. ‘The great days of Georges are over then. Don’t you count these as cousins? What would they be? Third cousins? Or cousins twice removed? I never know the difference, do you?’

‘Oh, I’d have to count them all right,’ said Hardy, ‘but they’re dead. The war. There are no more Georges to bring yet more Georges now unless one of them remarries and starts again. I tell you, I’m sick of the lot.’

‘And how did you find all this out since yesterday?’ I said. ‘It’s miraculous when your men are so stretched.’ I looked around at the tall cases of leather-bound books. ‘Is there a family history?’ I asked. ‘Is it all set out in one of these volumes here?’

Hardy looked up very sharply at the bookcase behind his head.

‘By God, there’d better not be,’ he said. ‘I found out by telephoning to my sister-in-law in St John’s Wood and sending her in to Somerset House to do my work for me. I’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘She must be a remarkable scholar,’ I said. ‘I always thought it took weeks of toil and wheedling of the porters to trace back as much as all that.’

‘I had her sworn in,’ Hardy said. ‘She’s now a special constable of the London Constabulary, Northern Division. So she got the curators or whatever you call them to hop to it and got the job done. She’ll probably refuse to turn in her armband ever again. She’s one of these new women. Well, I beg your pardon, for you’re probably one yourself. But I can just see her out on the street tonight, boxing strikers’ ears and telling them to go home to their beds.’

‘She sounds like Great Aunt Gertrude,’ I said. ‘Have you met that lady, Superintendent?’

Hardy nodded and crossed his arms – an involuntary attempt to defend himself against her, I thought.

‘You know she’s offered Mrs Balfour a home?’ I said. ‘We have to overturn this will.’

Hardy, with a determined glint in his dark eyes, gave the sharp single nod I had come to know, but then immediately after it he groaned.

‘Back to the Georges, then,’ he said.

‘I would bet that all of them have sound alibis,’ I said. ‘Having a George Pollard – no current address – named in the will when there are so many of them to choose from sounds exactly like Pip Balfour. Like one of the horrid little jokes he played on his wife.’

‘And everyone else,’ said Hardy.

I took a deep breath. This was going to take some explaining, and Hardy was not going to like it.

‘No, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Not everyone else. Not anyone else. Listen to what I worked out this afternoon.’ To his credit, he did, clearing up the mess of papers on the desk as I talked, saying nothing, taking no notes, just nodding now and then. When I had finished he offered me a cigarette, took one himself, lit both and stared at me.

‘So what the devil are they up to?’ he said at last. He sat up and looked around himself, ready to take hold of anyone he could find and shake it out of them. ‘Pretending that a man who’s cruel to his wife is cruel to his servants too, when he’s not. Are they covering for her?’

‘Not all of them. But going by significant looks and general squirming when I told them about Pollard, I’d say the kitchen girls are sitting on some sort of secret. The valet and chauffeur too. And the footman. Not Mrs Hepburn and not the butler. But definitely – most definitely – Mattie, Clara and Phyllis.’

‘Ah, Phyllis,’ said Hardy. ‘Our friend with the bulging purse.’

‘Did you get anywhere with the mystery of the seventeen pounds, by the way?’

‘She denied the whole thing,’ said Hardy. ‘Acted as if the very idea of a pawnshop was beyond her. And I couldn’t pursue it without “blowing your cover”.’ He looked tremendously proud of having delivered this choice morsel of vocabulary. ‘I’m delighted to hear that you think it’s worth me pressing her again.’

‘And Clara too,’ I said.

Mr Hardy rested his cigarette in the ashtray, laced his fingers together, then turned his hands palms outward and flexed them with a series of sharp cracking sounds. ‘I shall press with the greatest pleasure. I don’t like the feeling that someone has got one over on me; it’s not a feeling I’m used to. And’ – he unlaced his fingers and picked his cigarette up again – ‘while I’m not used to having to do everything myself these days – I’ve been a superintendent ten years now – I’m beginning to remember what a good way it is to get things done.’

‘Quite,’ I said, wondering if he knew how terrifying he was when he spoke that way, lips thin and brows lowered. ‘But if you will permit me, I have a plan to press Mattie myself and I’d like to pursue it. I think he might dissolve if one pressed him too abruptly, but I’m going to put him in a vice and turn the handle so slowly he won’t know what’s happening until all of a sudden the truth pops out.’ Mr Hardy looked terribly impressed, as well he might, for such a plan would have been pretty hot stuff, but in reality I was only trying to make sure that he stayed away from Mattie and left him to me. The dissolving was only too likely and, besides, I could not consign that stammer and those dimples to a man whose knuckles cracked in such a fearsome way.