The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

2

‘And all her hair, in one long yellow string I wound, three times her little throat around, and strangled her,’ said Alec, peering at the volume in the lamplight, and tracing the tiny print with the stem of his pipe.

‘That’s the one,’ I said. ‘Only it’s red.’

‘Not words you’d want your love to come cooing at you in your bedchamber,’ Alec said. He turned the page. ‘Good God, listen to this bit.’

‘Oh, please, no more!’ I said. ‘What a man he must have been – and after his poor wife wrote all those lovely sonnets for him.’

Alec snorted and put his pipe back in his mouth. We were in his library, on the evening of the successful interview. (I had braved the hoots of derision over Miss Rossiter’s adornments to commune with him, as I always did when a new case was stirring and at intervals while it wore on too.) At least, I thought to myself, the hoots of derision were all I should have to brave; there would be no frosty silence nor cutting remarks from Hugh when I got home since, after a great deal of glowering and muttering over the last four years, he had finally managed to find space inside his skull for the idea that Alec and I were friends, colleagues and nothing more, an idea I took great pains not to dislodge again.

‘I have to agree with young Mrs Balfour,’ Alec was saying now. ‘Walburga, was it? – poor girl! It sounds so torrid and mad, she’d have a hard time convincing either the bobbies or docs until he actually strikes. I suppose you’re convinced, are you?’

‘I am but, as to the bobbies, it’s even worse than having to convince them. I’m pretty sure that as long as he keeps to whispered threats she doesn’t have a case. She doesn’t even have a case for divorcing him unless she can unearth one of the philanderees and get him that way.’

‘She can’t divorce him for cruelty when he murmurs about winding her tresses round her little throat? That’s a bit thick.’

‘Apparently not,’ I said, trying to hide my smile. Alec is younger than me and sometimes seems much younger, as when he is troubled and wounded by life’s unfairness, by life’s showing itself so regularly to be ‘a bit thick’. ‘I went to the National Library and looked it up before I caught the train home,’ I told him. ‘Apparently, he can be as cruel as he likes as long as it’s only to Lollie – she doesn’t encourage “Walburga”, for obvious reasons.’

‘Law books in the National Library and grey serge, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘You’re flying all flags on this one, surely?’

‘You haven’t heard the half,’ I said. ‘Here’s what I propose to do next, darling.’ And I told him, to his evident and gratifying stupefaction; when I finished his mouth hung open, his pipe cooling, forgotten, in the ashtray.

‘You don’t stand a cat’s chance,’ he said at last.

‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I said, laughing.

‘But seriously, Dan, how do you hope to pull it off? How can you propose to go in and do what amounts to making a fool of a man who is certainly violent and probably raving mad? And why? Why not say you’re a girlhood friend or something?’

All of these were objections I had put to Lollie hours before, but she had answered them and, besides, I had come around to the notions for reasons of my own.

‘He wouldn’t let her have a friend to stay,’ I said. ‘And he won’t take any notice of me. As long as I dress soberly and keep my head down I’ll be fine. And I’ve decided not to attempt too much authenticity. I shall say I’m gently born and recently come down in the world. That should cover any amount of ignorance and unintended slips, don’t you think?’

Alec nodded rather reluctantly.

‘And most important of all,’ I went on, ‘there’s this question of Lollie being followed whenever she goes out and eavesdropped upon whenever she’s in the house. Do you see?’

‘Ah, of course,’ said Alec, who usually does see; it is one of the most comfortable aspects of our collaborations. ‘It must be one of the servants, doing his master’s bidding. Well, all right, you’ve convinced me.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, to be a fly on the wall though, Dandy, when you’re… when you’re busy… What exactly does a lady’s maid do all day?’

‘Don’t ask me!’ I said, rolling my eyes in not-completely-mock horror. ‘I have tomorrow and Sunday cramming with Grant – and won’t she adore it! – but for now I can’t imagine.’

‘I’m almost tempted to join you just to watch the fun. Would I make a footman?’ Alec stood up and came to offer me the cigarette box, bending over from the waist like a jointed wooden soldier and clicking his heels together with a beaming smile.

‘You look like a Punch cartoon of a bad waiter,’ I told him. ‘And anyway, there isn’t another opening. The Balfours, if you please, have twelve servants in their Edinburgh house, and goodness knows how many more in the Highlands.’

‘Twelve?’ said Alec, standing up straight again and frowning. He ran Dunelgar on seven and a few locals for the rough work. ‘What does he do, this Pip? Some kind of merchant or something, is he?’ He sat back down again and knocked out his pipe.

‘Well now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t do anything, but listen to this and tell me if you don’t agree that some earlier Balfour must have sold his soul to the devil.’ I lit my cigarette and sat back to regale him with the history of the Balfours as it had been told to me. (The last thirty minutes of Miss Rossiter’s interview had been taken up with it, almost as though Lollie could diminish the shortcomings of Pip himself by setting them against the triumphs of the Balfours in general.) It was quite a tale.

The first Balfour of any note came to prominence in the early days of the Georgian era, by setting up a bank in his native Edinburgh in 1717: the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank, whose name no one – from the founder, James Balfour himself, to the lowliest copying clerk – could be relied upon to reproduce with any accuracy (the pull of ‘Eastern Scottish’ in place of ‘Scottish Eastern’ being a particularly common pitfall) so that it is chiefly remembered among banking historians for the number of notes and drafts it issued with errors upon them. There is many a curio-cabinet which has, in one of its drawers, a family’s famous ‘bad banknote’ folded up and yellowing but still taken out and shown to visitors.

Inevitably, the merchants of the day made life easier for themselves by dubbing Balfour’s pet enterprise with a more descriptive title, and ‘the Silk and Tobacco’ flourished along with the trades which gave it its name. (There is still a public house in a back street of Edinburgh called the Silken Tab, whose hanging sign depicts a wigged and powdered old gentleman with a long pipe in his mouth, but since the associations have become blurred and the etymologies muddled, the current Balfours do not concern themselves about it.)

James Balfour Jr was a less cautious man than his father had been, a man who liked to be in at the start of things, and so it is unsurprising that in 1769 he was among the first to move down the hill, away from the smells and noise of the medieval Old Town, and into the stark majesty of a town house on Princes Street, with a view of the Castle and – once the draining of the old North Loch had finally been resolved, after many attempts and disappointments – as much fresh air as he, his wife and their seven children could hope for.

There was, however, to be little repose for Mr Balfour in his commodious new rooms, for he could not contain his eagerness to be part of the great expansion; new houses outside one’s own window were simply that much more fun than holds of silk and bales of tobacco leaves half a world away and in 1770, when every other financier in the capital was feeling well cushioned and replete with success, Balfour found himself in company not with them but with the rather more hard-bitten speculative builders, who were poised to see if their fortunes would swell with the city or go like tapers up a newly swept flue. Balfour would never have sailed as close to the wind as to endanger his fortune, but he did what was to his peers even more amazing. He sold up his father’s business: the Bank of Scotland opened its door with cold charity as to a waif on its step and the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank was no more.

So it was that the Balfour family got out of banking on the high tide just before the beginnings of the great long endless collapse and never had to underwrite a penny of it. And of course the New Town was the success story of the age and grew and grew until there was nowhere in his native city for the old man to put any more of his considerable fortune and his son – Robert Balfour – began to spread it around the land, and most notably to send it underground. From the lead mines of the Scottish uplands to the coal mines of the north of England, the Welsh silver mines and all the way to the tin mines of the West Country, Robert Balfour was chipping out of the earth more and more riches for himself and his own, sending the sons of lesser branches of the Balfour family to manage for him so that the name spread all over Britain and grew synonymous with a kind of far-seeing but hard-working massing of solid wealth.

In time, egged on by a son of his own with a taste for travel and adventure, Robert Balfour finally raised his gaze from the mine heads of Britain and looked to the East again, to India and to cotton, and grew richer still.

Now Robert’s grandson, the first Philip Balfour, was as happy sailing back and forth between Bengal and Scotland as his wife was unhappy, whether accompanying him on the voyages or staying put at either end, for she suffered equally badly from the heat, the cold and the most excruciating, mortifying seasickness. Indeed, there was only one place on earth where she could imagine settling and turning her back on gangplanks and portholes for ever and that was the magical, almost mythical, island whither her more glamorous friends regularly sailed in search of fun and fashions and whence they returned with tales of both which made young Mrs Balfour’s eyes and mouth water. Alexandra Balfour did not wish for the impossible: she could live without gold but every time she was forced onto the dusty streets of Calcutta or was carried through the mud of a mountain road in Kashmir on the neck of an elephant she pined anew for Manhattan, where the streets were paved.

In 1857, after a winter crossing which her husband called bracing but which reduced her to a state of such piteous and unrelieved sickness that their expected fourth child – whose arrival was the sole reason for the journey – came early and promptly left again, Alexandra prevailed. Philip was washed in guilt and grief but the spirit of his grandfather was lit in him as he began to ask around about the wonderful new city and the impossible new buildings rising up and up and up there and to write feverish letters to agents to secure for himself a patch of paradise while it was going.

And so it was that the Balfours made their second timely escape, from India this time, just before the Great Uprising which left every Company man with burned fingers and placed a mute in the neck of the jamboree for ever after.

Silk House – for Philip Balfour had a mind to family history – was to be the finest mansion in New York; he employed the newest and most daring of architects to plan its halls and cloisters and fountained courtyards, and the watercolour sketches of it, nestling in a green dip amongst hills with a cornflower-blue sky above and lush trees in the distance, had grown soft and faded from repeated rolling and unrolling, and rather grubby from the fingers of the three little Balfours choosing their bedrooms. Philip suffered one moment of disquiet in every ten of joy when he looked at the green dip and distant trees, for he could not quite make them fit into the other picture in his mind of lit streets and theatres and the vast emporia known as department stores. Once or twice, when he was regaling a chum at the club, he found himself not quite admitting of his half-built mansion that he had never set eyes on the place, and it did not bring him much comfort that – presumably because such a thing would never occur to them – none of the chums ever actually asked him.

They landed in November in 1858, in a gale which fired hailstones up the wide avenues like peas from a shooter and turned every cross-street corner into a maelstrom, and it was clear right away even to the smallest Balfour child that the green dip had been fancy. Alexandra prepared to put a brave face on her dismay: there was certainly paving – there was little else. She paled and felt her eyes fill with tears, however, when she saw their mansion. It was the same familiar block of marble and porticoes from the watercolour drawings, but where the gardens should have been there were not only streets instead of glades but, on all four sides, railways. Their dreamed-of home was set about by railway lines like a pig penned in with hurdles and Alexandra began a bout of weeping which lasted on and off until the spring.

From their quarters in one of the Fifth Avenue apartment hotels, Philip wrote letter after furious letter and stormed the agents’ offices, pored over street plans and maps, and even did his best with what scant volumes of American law he could lay his hands on, trying to find a hole through which he could wriggle. The names of the four railroad companies who owned one each of the hated tracks grew into a kind of bitter chant for him: Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem, he muttered to himself as he scratched out another rage-filled letter. Hudson, Central, Newhaven, Harlem – that was the worst of the difficulty. There were four of the damned things and he was shoved around among them like the hot potato in the party game and could never pin down any one of the four owners or any one of their many managers and state his case fairly.

Actually though, Philip Balfour was not the only one inconvenienced by the four separate railroads passing one another in mid-town; it was becoming intolerable to everyone (except the hansom-men who shuttled passengers back and forth between the lines), but it took a man of immense riches, with an entrepreneurial vision greater even than that of the first James Balfour himself, to set matters straight. Mr Vanderbilt saw what was needed and Silk House, Philip Balfour’s Valhalla, into which so much of the Balfour fortune had been poured, was a mere gnat to be swept away before the building of the Grand Central Terminus could begin.

‘Blimey,’ said Alec. ‘So it’s Vanderbilt money that’s furnished the twelve servants?’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘There’s one more chapter to go. Balfour was still angry enough to drive a flinty bargain with the great man and he did recoup more of his outlay than he could possibly have dreamed of, then – so Lollie told me – they left New York with the laughter of all the Manhattan sophisticates still ringing in their ears and took themselves southwards to what – in April – must have seemed like a soft and balmy land where they could finally start up their life of lotus-eating as planned.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Somewhere in the vast southern territory,’ I replied. ‘Not a state as such.’

‘Chumps,’ said Alec.

‘Indeed. They bought a huge spread with a white Palladian mansion on it, returned to New York to buy everything they needed to make life perfect there and arrived back neck and neck with the first heralds of summer – to wit, a swarm of biting insects of a size and ferocity never known in Calcutta. These were soon joined by things Lollie didn’t know the name of but which sound like flying leeches if you can imagine anything so horrid, and black flies that followed them around in a column above their heads in the open air, and little fat things that flew in battalions all around their heads in the shade. Makes one almost glad of midges.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘What happened next?’

‘Alexandra, exhausted and dejected, refused to leave. She shut the doors on the wildlife and stayed there until she died. Philip travelled around a good bit, doing nothing very useful, and his son – our Philip’s father – stuck it out until both parents were gone, planning to get shot of the place and come home to Scotland, which his mother had always made sound like absolute heaven to him.’

‘So when did they leave?’ Alec asked.

‘1871,’ I said, wondering if he would catch the significance of the date. He did not. ‘Philip and Alexandra died and Alexander, their son, was just getting around to offloading the place when matters became rather more interesting.’ Still Alec said nothing. ‘Can’t you guess? It’s poetic really – an echo of Robert Balfour with all his subterranean adventures.’

‘You’re kidding!’ said Alec. ‘Oil?’ I laughed along with him.

‘The hundreds of thousands of sun-baked, yellow-grassed, insectiferous acres which were no good for anything except getting lost in happened to be smack on top of a perfect magic treacle pot of oil, that’s still gushing out plumes of the stuff every day. So you see, twelve servants in an Edinburgh town house are really nothing.’

‘And what does the current Pip Balfour do with the rest of it?’

‘Counts it from time to time, I think. Too terrified by all the near misses to try anything more risky. Lollie says he felt the run of Balfour luck had to give out sometime and he doesn’t want to be the one who finally lets it slip through his fingers on some wild scheme.’

‘Well, that’s a pretty poor show,’ said Alec. ‘He’s hardly carrying the torch aflame, is he? Sounds like a bit of a ninny.’ He paused. ‘If ninnies went in for strangling their wives, that is.’

‘Yes,’ I said, agreeing with what he had not quite said. ‘It’s hard to come to a firm view from what we’ve been told, isn’t it? I can’t quite put him together somehow. I’m very much looking forward to meeting him for myself.’

‘I’m not looking forward to you meeting him,’ Alec said. ‘Promise me you’ll be careful, Dan.’

Tender concern for one’s safety is always gratifying to behold. Hugh, in marked contrast, barely raised his head when he heard I was going.

‘On Monday,’ I added. ‘To Edinburgh. I can’t say for how long.’

‘Good, good,’ he said and turned the page of his newspaper. I poked a hole in the top of one of my poached eggs and dabbed a piece of toast into it. I had only had one letter in the morning’s post and was shamelessly lingering, putting off the evils of the coming day.

‘You might know them,’ I said. ‘The people I’m… going to stay with.’

‘Mm,’ said Hugh. Then he added: ‘Hah!’ I waited. ‘They’ve locked them out. Should have done it nine months ago. This’ll bring them to their senses.’

‘The miners?’ I hazarded.

‘I knew this would happen,’ said Hugh, looking up at me at last. ‘I predicted it from the start if you remember, Dandy.’ I did not remember, but nodded anyway. ‘There’s no talking to these people and goodness knows how much money has been poured down the drain while everyone bent over backwards trying.’

It was my understanding – not firm but far from hazy – that both sides had their arms folded and their chins stuck out refusing to listen, but it was not worth starting an argument over it.

‘Will the coal run out?’ I asked.

‘No, they’ll be back at work before there’s any chance of that,’ Hugh assured me. ‘And should think themselves lucky to have work to go back to. If I were a mine-owner, I should sack the lot and give their jobs to someone a bit more grateful.’

I judged another silent nod to be the best response to this. Hugh had never sacked anyone in his life, not even the mole-catcher who had once ruined Gilverton’s lawns when, pushed beyond his limits by the little devils, he threw down his patented fumigation pump and testing rods and started digging wildly, swearing at the top of his voice and scattering divots of turf and sprays of soil for yards around him. Besides, the coal crisis was one of the few affairs of the day upon which Hugh and I saw eye-to-eye, or rather where our views happened to coincide: Hugh’s view that the mine-owners could do what they jolly well pleased with what was theirs and my view that the wages one read about in The Times always seemed generous enough, pounds and pounds a week, and many of the families had half a dozen wage packets all told, between father and sons, and then they always lived in those dear little rows of cottages built for the purpose and enjoyed, one assumed, free coal.

Hugh turned another page and breathed in sharply, then started coughing to expel the inhaled toast crumbs. After a minute, I half stood to go round and bang him on the back, but he waved me into my seat again.

‘Listen to this,’ he croaked, eyes still streaming. ‘The extraordinary conference of trade unionists currently convened in London will vote this afternoon upon whether to take sympathetic action in support of the miners.’ He took a gulp of tea and cleared his throat in a final-sounding way. ‘The day is upon us. I always said it would come.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘A shutdown,’ he said. All news was bad news with Hugh and his fears of an uprising were so oft expressed that I had ceased taking any notice of them. He had, for instance, continued to mutter darkly about Lenin even after he was dead and gone. This, however, sounded more definite than usual.

‘Shutdown of what?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ Hugh told me with a thrill of angry pleasure. ‘The whole country held to ransom, Dandy. No food in the shops, gasworks stopped, electricity dried up, hospitals in darkness, fires raging with no firemen to put them out, no teachers in the schools, factories silent…’

‘But they can’t do that,’ I said. ‘There must be laws.’

‘Laws!’ said Hugh, with a very dry laugh. ‘The overthrow of the rule of law is the whole point, my dear. That’s what they want and they’ve been champing for a chance to get started on it. The miners are just the excuse they’ve been waiting for.’

‘But that sounds like…’

‘A revolution,’ he thundered. ‘Which is exactly what it is. A workers’ revolt.’

‘Stop it,’ I said, feeling genuinely scared now. ‘That could never happen. Not here.’

‘They’re voting this afternoon,’ said Hugh, tapping a finger on the newspaper where he had read it. I let my breath go in a great rush and shook my head at him.

‘Well, exactly!’ I said. ‘They’re voting on it. They’ll never do it, Hugh; you’re a fearful dramatist sometimes.’

‘I shall remind you that you said so,’ he said, much on his dignity, and with that the conversation was at its close.

‘Grant,’ I said, sidling into my bedroom again after breakfast. Grant started violently, and she and I both winced as her knuckles rapped against the inside of the drawer where she was carefully laying out newly ironed underclothes.

‘Nothing wrong is there?’ she said. ‘Madam. Why aren’t you out on your walk?’ She glanced out of the window where the weather was as fine as could be hoped for, for May in Perthshire, that is, chilly and gusty but, for the moment, almost dry. I felt a small slump at the thought of my predictability, but I rallied myself before she could see it and set a bright smile on my face.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What are your plans for the day?’ Grant frowned at me, more perplexed than ever.

‘My plans?’ she said. ‘I was going to start on changing over your wardrobe, laying away your winter things and seeing if any of your summer frocks from last year are worth airing out again.’

‘I see. Well, I’m going to have to ask you to leave all that, I’m afraid, while I bend you to my will.’ I smiled even wider; Grant frowned even deeper. ‘I – I – I don’t quite know, Grant, how much of what I do,’ – I took a deep breath – ‘professionally, I mean, has come to your attention in the last while.’

‘You mean Gilver and Osborne Investigations?’ My mouth dropped open. ‘I thought you must be starting on a new case when I saw those shoes you dyed. How can I help you?’

‘I see. Yes. So you do know about it then?’ The name of Gilver and Osborne was pure servants’ hall fantasy of course (although it had a ring to it) and I could not imagine how the newly black shoes, hidden in my sitting room while they dried and smuggled up to an attic the previous evening upon Miss Rossiter’s return, had been rumbled but there was no question that Grant was fully informed.

‘Oh yes, madam,’ she said. ‘We were all very proud of you downstairs over that last business. Even Mr Pallister, now that the master knows all about it and has given it his blessing.’ Grant delivered all of this in her usual blithe tone, then finished it off with a belated and unconvincing: ‘If you’ll excuse the liberty.’

‘Right, well, good,’ I said. ‘In that case, what I’m about to ask you will come as less of a surprise. I’m going undercover, Grant. Do you know what that means?’ She nodded, looking thrilled.

‘What as?’ she breathed. ‘I can drop everything this minute and get a costume run up for you, madam. When do you need it?’

‘I’m starting on Monday. I’m going downstairs. I’m going to be a lady’s maid.’

Grant’s lips twitched once, twice, then she bit her cheeks and pulled her eyebrows very firmly downwards.

‘And your “mistress”, madam?’ she said, with her voice under commendable control. ‘Is it her you’re investigating?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s she who has employed me.’

‘Oh, well then,’ said Grant, lifting her hands high and then letting them clap down softly against her skirt again, ‘in that case you’ll be fine.’ As votes of confidence go it was a stinker but, like most other people, I always claim to value honesty and so I could not refuse such a good dollop of it when it was served up to me.

By the time I fell into bed on Sunday evening, my head was heavy with great spilling heaps of new facts and long lists of outlandish preparations and I had a thick notebook full of daily, weekly and monthly chores.

‘Crêpe de chine, satin, tussore – cold. Cashmere, chiffon, mohair – cool. Silk, faille, wool – warm. Lawn, cotton, linen – hot,’ I repeated to myself. ‘I’ve got it. And down again – wring, squeeze, press, drip. And up: sprinkle iron cool, sprinkle press cool, damp iron warm, wet press hot. It’s easy!’ I turned over, ignoring the crackling sound of the cold sugar-water waves in my hair; Grant had spent much of Sunday afternoon teaching me how to make them after a brief and alarming episode with the hot irons in the morning. I punched my pillow and clicked my tongue to make Bunty come up the bed a bit and let me put my arms around her. I had never been separated from her for more than a night or two since she had arrived – tiny, fat and wriggling – all those years before and I did not look forward to driving away and leaving her behind me. She would be quite happy with Alec and Millie, his spaniel, but I had slipped a photograph of her into my bag as a comfort to me. The bag was sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor with a plump black umbrella leaning against it and an extravagantly hideous hat balanced on top. The shoes, cleaned and re-dyed by Grant with much tutting, were lined up neatly under my chair, the grey serge suit laid out over its back. My tin trunk was already downstairs by the stable-yard door ready to be lifted onto the dogcart and taken to the station in the morning. I gave Bunty a squeeze, kissed her head and closed my eyes on it all, hoping that sleep would come swift and dreamless.