The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

4

There was my villain. He looked even younger than his wife, with a long, lozenge-shaped face and three black dashes – two eyebrows and a moustache – very stark against his skin, which was smooth and pale down to his cheeks and then rather blue, needing its evening shave. His black hair was extremely smooth too and his eyes as he came closer I saw to be brown, like a spaniel’s. It suddenly seemed very unlikely that a devil could have such brown spaniel eyes.

‘Well,’ he said to Lollie, ‘don’t you look lovely!’ Lollie said nothing. As he had approached, her defiance had retreated until her chin was tucked down and she was looking up at him from under her lashes, breathing quickly. He gave a quick frown – of puzzlement or irritation, it was impossible to say – but then with visible effort managed another smile and even rubbed his hands together as he continued. ‘Yes, lovely,’ he said. ‘Thank you for putting on such a good show for me. It’s bound to be dull.’ Then he turned towards me, still at Lollie’s feet, and put his hand out, bowing slightly.

‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ I shook his hand before I could help myself and he turned the handshake into a gallant gesture of helping me up. He had remarkably rough hands for a gentleman and his shirtsleeves – he was coatless for some reason – were rolled up just a little too far, well beyond the elbow, which is a very endearing trait in a grown man. ‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sanding my model sailing ship. Lollie always tells me I look like a docker, don’t you, darling?’

Lollie gave him an uncertain smile and spoke up at last.

‘Harry will straighten you out in no time.’

Pip laughed.

‘Gosh, yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Harry will certainly put me to rights. Wash and brush up and the rudiments of the Labour movement.’ My smile, which I could not help, appeared to please him enormously and he beamed back at me. ‘But peculiar valets notwithstanding, Rossiter, I hope you’ll be very happy with us. And take good care of my beloved girl for me.’ Then he glanced at his watch, blew a kiss towards his wife and withdrew.

That, I thought to myself, was more conversation than Hugh had had with Grant in the last twenty years. I looked wonderingly at Lollie and she caught the look and threw it back to me.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s very convincing. Now do you see why I could never get anyone to believe me?’

I descended the stairs slowly and spent a good ten minutes staring out at my cherry tree before I wrote another word in my notebook. When Phyllis knocked on my door to tell me it was supper-time I was still puzzling.

‘Mistress looked lovely,’ she said to me as we climbed the stairs. ‘I saw her come down. The last one – Miss Abbott – didnae hold with rouge and lipstick and mistress never could put her foot down, but she looked a picture tonight.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you sometime if you like.’ I had correctly interpreted Phyllis’s wistful tone.

‘Oh, Miss Rossiter, would you really? Would you do me for my day out? Not to go and see my ma and fa because my fa would kill us both but every other week I go to the dancing with my pal and she aye tells me I look like a milkmaid.’

I scrutinised her face as we passed under a lamp in the kitchen passageway, and wished I had made Grant instruct me in the mysteries of the kohl pencil and lash black, but I had hardly foreseen the respectable Mrs Balfour needing such attentions. Could I remember it from the times Grant had insisted on painting it onto me? (For the disposition of power between ‘mistress’ and Miss Abbott had its reflection in my bedroom at home.)

That first evening in the servants’ hall was a perfect admixture of comfort, tiredness and boredom, and if one can get these three ingredients in proper proportion nothing is nicer; to be too tired to mind that one is bored and too comfortable to mind that one is tired makes for an evening of guilty pleasure that comes my way rather seldom. Mrs Hepburn and I occupied the armchairs once more, with Mr Faulds joining us between bursts of duty in the dining room; Mattie, Harry and John played gin rummy; Clara was nowhere to be seen – busy upstairs with the dinner guests, I supposed, as was Stanley – but the other girls sat sewing and chatting until the dirty plates began to come down again, then Millie and Eldry returned to the scullery with groans and yawns and Mrs Hepburn sauntered after them to supervise and plan for the following day.

Phyllis immediately took up Mrs Hepburn’s place in the armchair; I was fast beginning to see that these soft chairs were the prize of the servants’ hall and that no amount of time was too short to make it worth claiming one whenever all of one’s seniors had left the room.

‘So have you met master then?’ she said softly to me. The lads at their card-game were not listening. I nodded, trying not to perk up too visibly. ‘And what did you think of him?’ I took a while before I answered.

‘He seemed very nice,’ I said. ‘Very friendly. But I did wonder…’

‘Oh, he’s friendly all right,’ said Phyllis. ‘Just make sure you lock your door tonight, that’s all.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘One of those, is he?’ I felt a thrill of sophistication as I said this and Phyllis nodded, her eyelids half-closed and her tongue exploring her cheek in a triumphal show of ennui.

‘And who goes in to light his fire of a morning?’ I said. ‘Not you, dear, is it? I hope not.’

‘He’s never bothered me – thank goodness,’ Phyllis said. ‘Not in that way.’

‘But Miss Abbott?’ I said. She nodded.

‘And Mr Faulds can say what he likes about that baronet in North Berwick being a step up,’ she said, ‘but we all know why Maggie didn’t work her notice.’

‘Forgive me prying, dear,’ I wriggled forward in my chair and spoke even more softly to her, ‘but when you said he didn’t bother you in that way, what did you…’

‘I’m on notice,’ said Phyllis, ‘for giving him cheek. I’m on my last warning and if I don’t behave I’ll be out on my ear with no character.’

‘Well, I like that!’ I said. ‘For sticking up for your chums? For telling him to leave the others alone?’

‘No…’ said Phyllis, slowly. ‘It’s a funny thing, Miss Rossiter, but I can’t even remember what it was that riled him up so, what it was I’m supposed to have said or done.’ She shook her head. ‘He must have made me so angry I had some kind of a brainstorm. Well, it would be like him.’

‘Right then,’ said Mr Faulds’s voice, making us both jump. He was standing in the doorway, cradling a Schweppes bottle in his arms like a sleeping baby. ‘This is nearly empty,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish it off down here to let me send it back for filling. But not tonight.’ He flicked the central light off from the switch plate by the door, setting off a chorus of tutting and injured sighs.

‘You might have let us finish the hand, Mr Faulds,’ said John.

‘You can get up early and finish it in the morning if you’ve a mind,’ replied the butler.

‘Oh, Mr Faulds,’ said Phyllis, ‘what about our sing-song?’ She nodded towards the far end of the room where, in the corner by the window, there was a small and rather battered piano.

‘That’s right,’ said Mattie, jumping up and trotting towards it. ‘You promised, Mr Faulds. And it’s my turn to play. I’ve been practising two hours a day, every day.’

‘Mattie MacGibney!’ said Phyllis, staring at him with her eyes crossed in a comical way. ‘When do you ever get two spare hours a day to practise without bothering anyone? Don’t tell such fibs.’ Mattie blushed and mumbled an apology. ‘We usually have songs at the piano on a Sunday, Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis, turning to me, ‘but we were all upside down yesterday with Maggie and everything and we missed it. We go to pieces when it’s Mr Faulds’s Sunday off sometimes.’

The butler gave her a fond smile but said nothing. Mattie was on the piano stool now, twirling himself around on his tiptoes to get the thing to the correct height for his slight frame. Mr Faulds stood with his hand still up at the switch, half frowning and half smiling at Phyllis.

‘Not tonight, Phyllis,’ he said, jerking his thumb upwards. ‘Master’s sitting on in the dining room with the port and you know how the sound carries.’

‘Any road,’ I said, ‘who wants hymns of a Monday night, really?’

‘Oh, it’s not hymns,’ said Phyllis.

‘Anything but!’ John put in.

‘Now, now,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘you’ll be giving Miss Rossiter the wrong idea of us all.’

‘Mr Faulds was on the music halls,’ said Mattie. He had stopped twirling round and was hanging on to the edges of the stool waiting for his head to stop spinning.

‘For a while, Fanny,’ said the butler, ‘in my distant youth, and I know a good lot of songs, but I’m careful what ones I pass on to the youngsters. “Boiled Beef and Carrots” kind of thing. And “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor”. None of the ripe stuff.’ He winked at me and I tried a wordly smirk back at him even though I had never been in a music hall to hear any of the other songs that he might be suppressing.

‘Aye, there’s an iron fist of censorship, right enough,’ said Harry, to a chorus of groans and a raspberry from John. ‘Mattie and me know a wheen of good songs too.’ He lay back in his chair and broke out in a confident baritone, sending the words straight up in the air towards the ceiling and the dining room above. ‘The people’s flag is deepest red, it shrouded oft our martyred-’

‘Quiet!’ As lusty as Harry’s voice was, Mr Faulds drowned him out, all that projecting from his diaphragm to the back row of the upper circle, I supposed. ‘Now, come on, lads, and don’t keep me waiting, Stanley’s off down the garden already.’

Harry stood up grinning and he and the other two filed out, looking sleepy enough to convince one that they welcomed bedtime really. Mr Faulds gathered up the pack of cards once they had gone, shuffled them efficiently and slapped them down onto the chimneypiece with a wink for Phyllis and me, then he followed the lads out of the room.

‘They sleep upstairs in the carriage house,’ Phyllis told me. ‘So Mr Faulds has to lock the back door behind them at night. He’s always chivvying them away to their beds so he can get to his. Mind you, he’s not usually as sharp as all this – it’s not ten yet.’ She shrugged. ‘But if he’s at them he’ll come back and start on at me, so I’d better shift myself.’ She yawned extravagantly and stretched her arms above her head. ‘You can suit yourself,’ she said, ‘but Mr Faulds puts the lamps off when he turns in, so…’

I was well used to creeping around with a candle but my night’s work was far from over and I could not afford to linger. I shared a few words with Mrs Hepburn who was standing in the doorway of the larder just outside her kitchen, marking off orders for the morning on a slate, and popped my head into the scullery to say goodnight to Eldry and Millie, who had got as far as scrubbing out the sinks with sand and sluicing the floor and who looked pleased to be paid the attention. I called up a soft greeting to Clara who was coming down from the dining room at last, white in face and slow of step with tiredness, then I retired. As I stood splashing my face in my little washroom – with a candle, in fact, since it turned out that the electricity which surged so luxuriously around the rest of the house had not yet reached that corner – I could see Mattie’s pale hair gleaming in the moonlight as the three boys made their way down the garden and could hear Mr Faulds locking up the back kitchen door above my head and trying the handles. A few minutes later, as I sidled out into the passageway with my nightdress over my shoulder, he was coming along the corridor towards the sub-basement door.

‘Goodnight then, Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve had a pleasant first day.’

‘Indeed I have, Mr Faulds,’ I said. ‘It seems a very happy household. I’m glad to have joined it.’ He locked the door, making an echoing clunk all around us, then removed the key, hung it on a hook and shot the bolts, top and bottom, with the kind of resounding clang one can feel in one’s teeth.

‘Your windows closed, Miss Rossiter?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Lovely job. I’ll bid you goodnight, then. And I hope you sleep soundly. Oh but, Miss Rossiter?’ I waited. ‘It’s not my place but we’ve no housekeeper to say it so I hope you’ll forgive me.’ He gestured towards my nightdress. ‘You should really have mistress’s things folded and in a muslin bag for carrying through the house. That there doesn’t look good, if you ask me.’

The stairs from the kitchen floor emerged opposite the dining-room doorway, as one would expect, and coming up them I saw that the door was open. I lowered my eyes in proper maidly fashion and prepared to scuttle past, but was arrested by Pip Balfour calling my name. He had evidently been lying in wait for me; had, in fact, drawn his chair far back from the table to be sure of spotting me.

‘A moment, Rossiter,’ he said, rising and beckoning me into the room. With my nightie behind my back, I stepped forward and bobbed a faint curtsey. ‘I just wanted to say,’ he continued, ‘that is, I mean, to say again, how very welcome you are. My wife…’ He paused and fiddled with the stem of his brandy glass. ‘… my wife is in great need of you.’

‘I’m sure,’ I said, giving Miss Rossiter’s vowels my all, for here was a test of them. ‘Most discommoding to have been left without her maid, sir.’

‘It’s not that, Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘It’s more than that. She hasn’t been herself lately. Not at all.’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ I said, and from the way he let his breath go in a short sigh I saw that this conventional answer had disappointed him, which was, of course, a triumph to me.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m very glad you’re here. She needs companionship, you know. It’s not good for her to be so much on her own.’ He was a master of his art, if art it were, because even knowing what I knew I could not fault the words, the voice, the look, the slight suggestion of fidgeting (far short of any histrionic hand-wringing but a nod in its direction). Thankfully, I knew exactly what to say; one never forgets the sting of being snubbed by a servant with whom one has been too chummy. I even rather relished the chance to give it a go.

‘Very good, sir,’ I said, eyes flat, voice wooden. Flushing a little, he dismissed me.

Lollie was already undressed when I let myself into her room, and was sitting on her bed in a pair of yellow flannel pyjamas, hugging her knees to her chin. The blinds were down – the lavender and white chintz was clearly just for show – and they shifted a little as the breeze blew through the open window.

‘Is there anything for me to do?’ I said. ‘Hanging things up or brushing or anything?’ Lollie shook her head.

‘I told you I hadn’t always had a maid,’ she said. ‘I’ve shaken out my evening clothes and put them away and I’ve washed some small things and hung them up in the bathroom but you might take them downstairs in the morning and let them finish off drying there in case anyone should wonder.’

‘I’ll just change then,’ I said, heading for the bathroom.

‘And I’ll make up your bed,’ said Lollie. ‘I’ve pilfered some pillows and blankets. Will you be all right on the chaise or would you rather have this? I don’t mind which for me.’ I hesitated. The chaise was wide and long and I was used to a little constriction anyway – Bunty takes up a great deal of room when she is deeply asleep – and besides, was it actually a politeness to offer one’s bed to a guest who knew that there might be a visitor in the night bent upon strangling its occupant?

‘I’ll be fine on the chaise,’ I assured her. ‘And perhaps we could draw the screen across in front of it. If anything should happen – if your husband should visit you – I’d like to be hidden from view.’

When I returned in my nightgown, wishing for flannel pyjamas of my own since the open windows let all of the night’s chill into the room and the screen shut me off from the fire as well as from the door, Lollie was under the bedclothes with a glass in her hand and had set another on the table by my little bed.

‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘Just a little one to help us sleep, but I couldn’t find the soda so it’s neat, I’m afraid.’ I tried to look grateful, but the thick, dark sherry at six o’clock and the beer with the sausage pie had been followed by the burgundy which Mr Faulds thought really should be drunk up that evening after all so that a long glass of water and an aspirin would have been my first choice for a nightcap.

‘How did you meet, you and Pip?’ I asked, when I was tucked up, feeling very comfortable against my heap of pillows and under my heap of blankets, feeling – actually – very similar to how one used to feel wrapped in furs on a deckchair during those long Atlantic crossings, especially with the stiff breeze and the feeling slightly queasy.

‘At a tennis party,’ said Lollie. ‘We were partnered by the girl whose party it was, because we were both so terrible no one else wanted to play with us. We got put out very quickly, of course, and spent the rest of the afternoon together. The very next day Pip came to speak to my father.’

‘And he gave his blessing?’

‘Almost,’ said Lollie. ‘My father was the last bishop of Brechin.’

‘Rev. Percival?’ I said. ‘I remember him very well. I met him many times.’

‘Well, he insisted on Pip becoming an Anglican, but apart from that he made no objections. I was only eighteen, but my mother – she was never strong – had died three years before and my father was fifty when I was born,’ said Lollie, ‘and his health was beginning to fail, so I think he was glad to know I wasn’t going to be alone. Glad to see me settled and secure, you know.’ She laughed a little at her own words.

‘And you must have taken to him,’ I said. ‘To Pip, I mean.’

‘I fell head over heels the moment I saw him,’ she said. ‘Well, no, not the very moment, but within ten minutes. A bumblebee had got itself mixed up in the tennis net and some of the other boys were taking swipes at it with their racquets. I told them to stop and tried to pick it out, but Pip put his fingers in the holes of the net all around the bee to stretch it and then he blew – very gently – and it flew away. He told me our skin can feel like hot coals to bees’ feet. Well, to spiders and all kinds of creepy-crawlies.’

‘How… touching,’ I said, trying not to sound as though I were smiling. Entomology was an unusual route into courtship, but I did not doubt her sincerity.

‘We were married the following spring,’ she said, ‘and we were very happy. We went on cruises and visited lots of exciting places.’

‘Visiting relatives?’

‘No,’ said Lollie. ‘There aren’t any. Well, there are actually any number of cousins but they’re not on speaking terms.’

‘He turned even his cousins against him?’

‘No,’ said Lollie. ‘None of that was Pip’s fault. It was his grandfather – rather a horrible old man. He held the purse strings and so he thought he could tell everyone what to do. And he disowned all his sisters, because of their “disappointing marriages”, and the family went its separate ways. No, we just travelled to anywhere that sounded like fun. America and the Indies and we went to Africa but it was shockingly hot – and then we came home and found this house and I was looking forward to… well…’

‘Babies?’ I guessed.

‘That is, I was hoping for them – we both were – but then Pip started to change, off and on, and things became rather strained between us until, last Christmas, what I told you happened and since then it’s been just awful. And the worst thing about it is that sometimes – most of the time even, and always when anyone is watching – he seems just the same sweet old Pip as ever, so that I never know what to expect and I can’t tell anyone and I… I almost begin to doubt my reason sometimes. I-’

‘Sssh!’ I said. I had heard a floorboard creak outside on the landing. Slowly I sat up and put my eye to the space between two panels of the screen, peering through it at the door handle. For minutes nothing happened, although I was sure from the very silence that he was out there, listening, as tense as we were, and then I heard a footstep and another going away down the stairs. ‘He’s gone,’ I said to Lollie in a whisper, ‘but we should stop talking now.’

It was a remarkably quiet night, I thought, as I lay there. I had never lived in a town and when Hugh and I used to take a London house, before the war and the children, the streets rang with life until the early hours of morning. Here though, on this Monday night in Edinburgh, nothing came in at the open windows except the occasional sound of a policeman’s heavy tread as he passed with measured pace along the street and back again. Just after midnight struck, there was some distant shouting and catcalls, and I wondered if somewhere, in some other part of town, the start of the strike was being celebrated or lamented, but it was very distant shouting and I turned over and burrowed deeper into the blankets, feeling sleep begin to steal close to me and hearing Lollie’s breathing start to slow.

It was light when next I opened my eyes, but in Scotland in May that is no help to one and I squinted at my wristwatch before so much as stretching, in case more sleep might be in the offing.

‘Good morning,’ said Lollie’s voice. ‘I was just about to wake you. You’d better get back down to your room before Clara arrives, don’t you think?’

I sat up a little, shuddering at the empty brandy glass on the table, and swung my feet to the floor.

‘How much time do I have?’ I croaked, standing and stumbling towards the bathroom where my clothes were laid. Last night, padding up and down the stairs in the lamplight seemed neither here nor there, but being four flights away from my bedroom in my nightclothes with the household stirring gave me a nasty creeping feeling up the backs of my legs this morning. I dressed hastily, dragged my hands over my hair, stuffed my nightdress into a cupboard until later and let myself out onto the landing.

All was quiet enough up here, but from below I could hear the scraping of a grate shovel as someone cleared a fire and from further below that, there was a sudden dull boom. Yesterday morning I should have been at a loss to explain such a noise arising from what sounded like the bowels of the earth but now I knew it to be the sound of Mrs Hepburn, shutting an oven door with her knee. I stopped at Pip’s door on my way past and put my head near to the panelling, but there was no sound from inside so I crossed to the stairway and started down it.

Between the drawing-room and dining-room floors I met Eldry on her way up. She was carrying two trays stacked one on top of the other and was in the striped morning dress which she wore above stairs, but had a capacious brown apron over it. She looked startled to see me, but I carried off the encounter very well.

‘Where’s Clara?’ I demanded. ‘It’s she whom mistress is expecting.’

‘Not feeling very well this morning, Miss Rossiter,’ said Eldry, ‘so I said I’d bring the trays and do the fires both together.’

I frowned at her. A tweenie should not on any account be carrying tea trays and certainly should not be raking ashes and touching tea things in the same apron. I was surprised at Mr Faulds for letting this pass.

‘Couldn’t the valet have helped?’ I asked. ‘Harry?’

‘Harry’s not up yet, I don’t think,’ said Eldry and it seemed to me that she was blushing a little. ‘Besides,’ she said softly, ‘I dinna mind.’ She turned her eyes towards the back of the house, towards – I thought – the garden and yard and carriage house in the mews, where Harry would be sleeping, and smiled a very small and rather secretive smile. ‘I dinna mind taking on a bit extra to spare him.’

Ah, I thought, remembering Phyllis’s teasing.

‘I’ll take mistress’s off your hands anyway,’ I said. ‘She’s awake already. No sound from him yet, though.’ I nodded at the uppermost of the two trays where a teacup, pot and milk jug, along with a rolled-up Scotsman, were laid on a plain cloth.

‘Good!’ said Eldry. ‘I hope I can get in and out without him stirring. I havenae got his paper, see?’ She sounded rather fearful. ‘He takes The Times but it never came. And when Mattie went round to the paper shop to get it, they said they had none, cos there’s no trains and so they’re all stuck in London. No trains at all, miss, nor buses nor trams, and Mattie said he met a man who’d walked up from Leith and the docks are as quiet as the grave and even the gasworks! I never thought it would really happen.’

‘Nor I,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

‘So Mattie got a Scotsman instead, but I cannae make up my mind whether to take it in or leave him with none.’

‘Take him the Scotsman,’ I said. ‘The strike’s not your fault. He can’t blame you for it.’ Eldry said nothing but looked far from consoled by my breeziness. ‘Or I tell you what,’ I said, ‘let me take his tray in to him.’ I welcomed any chance to see more of Pip, for I was still far from knowing what I thought about any of it.

‘Oh, I couldnae, Miss Rossiter,’ said Eldry. ‘It wouldn’t be right, miss. You’re mistress’s lady.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said, truthfully.

‘Beg pardon, Miss Rossiter, but you would if you kent him,’ Eldry said and flushed.

‘So I believe, dear,’ I answered. ‘Well, how’s this? I’ll take mistress’s and let’s leave the doors open and if he gives you any bother when you go in I’ll come in at your back and sort him out for you. He doesn’t scare me.’

Eldry bit her lip and opened her eyes very wide. It was an expression she often wore and one which did nothing to enhance her meagre claims to beauty.

‘He’ll put you on notice, if you’re not careful,’ she said. ‘But he’ll no’ try anything with both of us there, at least.’

We managed the handover of the bottom tray quite smoothly even there on the stairs and Eldry’s chin was as high as mine as we processed upwards. I had no worries: it was Lollie who had engaged me and it was only Lollie who could sack me; in fact it was rather odd that he had got involved in the matter of Phyllis, the housemaid. I wondered again what it was she had done.

Upstairs, Eldry made her way to the back landing, to negotiate the night latch which began the circuitous secondary route to Pip’s bedside. She managed the little key admirably well one-handed while balancing the tray on the other and I left her to it, knocking softly on Lollie’s door and sweeping in, the way Grant always swept into my room when she was dressed and I was not, as though taking match point in some game.

Lollie, though, was in her bathroom and missed it. The water was gurgling and steam was coiling out around the half-open door. I put the tray down on her bed, opened the blinds, plumped her pillows and was turning to leave again – Eldry could come in and light the fire; there were limits to my collegiate helpfulness and to my domestic expertise – when I heard a scream.

For a second I stood still, listening. Was it inside the house? My eyes flew to the open windows, but then there came another and the sound of running footsteps, footsteps on floorboards – this was no street accident outside. I tore across the floor and out onto the landing. Someone – Eldry – was banging on the inside of Pip’s bedroom door, still screaming.

I raced across the hall, through the little passageway, through the bathroom – still shuttered – and swung around into the bedroom through the open door. Here the curtains were drawn back and the shutters folded away, but I could see no one – no sign of Pip – nothing except Eldry beating on the other door, sobbing, begging for someone to let her out.

‘Turn the key,’ I shouted. ‘Eldry, it’s still locked – turn the key!’ But she was beside herself, tugging on the handle, whimpering now, and she clung to me as I got to her and took her in my arms, feeling her shaking.

‘There, there,’ I said, as I opened the door for her. ‘Shush now. What did he do to you?’

Eldry stumbled out into the hall, shaking her head, and pointed past me. I swung round, thinking he must be coming up behind me, but saw nothing. She slid down the wall until she was sitting, still pointing. Over by the bed, the tray was on the floor, the teapot broken and empty, the sheets of newspaper scattered around. I walked towards it and as I got closer I began to see.

It was a high-set Victorian bed, matching the rest of the furniture in the room, and the footboard was almost as tall as the head, hiding the bed from the rest of the room until one came around the side of it. The blankets were pushed down, but the top sheet was drawn right up over the pillows. I could not clearly see the outline of the man underneath, though, because just where the pillows began the sheet was held away from the mattress, like a tent, around something sticking up there. Where it did touch down again, all around, there was a bloom of red, seeping up through the linen from underneath, spreading like ink into a dampened blotter, and now that I was close there was a smell too, like old coins and like the gamekeeper’s cart on the way home after a good day and like the worst of the hospital during the war, which I had almost forgotten.

Leaning over very carefully, I picked up the edge of the sheet and lifted it away. Underneath was more – sickeningly more – red: a lake of red, thick and clotted, darkening to purple at its deepest, spreading across the bed, seeping upwards over the pillows, covering the pyjamas, coating the neck, filling the ears, matting the hair, so only Pip Balfour’s cold white face rose above it. His eyes were open, clouded, and his mouth was open too and blood had spurted and run into it, outlining his teeth in rusty orange, and what had tented the sheet over him was the knife, a long, bone-handled knife, lodged to its hilt and standing straight up out of his neck, pooled all around with blood that was almost black. With the back of one hand I touched his forehead, where no blood had spattered; it was cold. I let the sheet drop back down again and retraced my steps to the little passageway.

My fingers were numb as I dropped the latch on the inside of the door and I tested and retested it to make sure I had locked it shut and not open. I locked the door between the hall and the bathroom, then the door between the bathroom and bedroom, and then I crossed the room and took the key out of the main bedroom door, stepped outside, closed the door, locked it and put the key in my pocket.

Eldry looked up at me from where she was still sitting on the floor.

‘Is it master?’ she said. I nodded. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Another nod. Then she sat up a little straighter and sniffed hard. ‘Good,’ she said.

‘Go downstairs and tell Mr Faulds to telephone to the police,’ I said. ‘Can you do that? You’re not going to faint, are you?’ Eldry shook her head and got, rather unsteadily but very determinedly, to her feet.

‘I’ll hold on to the rail,’ she said. ‘But can you get the tray, miss?’

‘Never mind the tray,’ I said.

‘I cannae leave it there all dropped and broken.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But the police,’ said Eldry, sounding tearful again. ‘They’ll find my fingerprints on it and it’s right beside the bed, beside the body. I opened the shutters and took it over to him.’

‘I’ll tell them what happened,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

This seemed to satisfy her and she turned to leave, but then stopped and looked back at me.

‘I tell you something, miss,’ she said. ‘I don’t blame her, do you?’

It took me a moment to find my voice and even when I did it was shaking.

‘Don’t be silly, Eldry,’ I said. ‘And don’t let me hear you saying such things again.’

But my heart was thudding – great dull, painful thuds – as I went back to Lollie’s bedroom door and pushed it open. She was back in bed, with a cardigan jersey on over her pyjamas and a cup of tea balanced in her lap. I stayed on the landing in the shadow where she could not see me.

‘Clara?’ she said. ‘Is that you? Tell Eldry not to bother with the fire since she hasn’t lit it yet. I think it’s going to be a lovely day. Did you hear that funny noise just then? I was running the taps but I’m sure I heard some kind of commotion.’

The greatest actress in the world, surely, could not have summoned such a speech and delivered it in that sunny voice, with that smile, if she had seen what was there in the other bedroom, much less if she had made it happen. And yet, I thought, and yet…

I walked forward into the light so she could see me.

‘Oh, it’s you, Dan- Miss Rossiter, I mean,’ she said. ‘Did you hear that hullabaloo? Has Phyllis seen a mouse again?’ I closed the door behind me. ‘Dandy?’ she said, looking at me properly for the first time. ‘You look terrible. What’s happened? What’s he done now?’