The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

5

Mr Faulds was purple with rage, but I would not be moved.

‘On what authority?’ he demanded, standing in front of me, shaking with anger.

‘On the authority of an informed citizen, Mr Faulds,’ I said. ‘And on the authority of the mistress of the house, who is now, following this horrific event, the head of the house. And on the-’

‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said, making an enormous effort to calm down and speak as reasonably as I spoke to him. ‘Might I remind you that you have been a member of this household since yesterday, whereas I have run it for the last three and a half years, so I don’t give scat for any of your clever-clogs talk. Now, give me that key.’ He was bellowing again by the end of the speech and I glanced towards the staircase, where most of the other servants were ranged upon the steps looking through the banisters at us.

‘For pity’s sake, Mr Faulds,’ called out Mrs Hepburn from Lollie’s room, where she was administering hugs and, I suspected, more brandy. ‘Get away somewhere else if you can’t stop shouting!’ Her voice dropped again and we could hear the soothing murmur of her comforting Lollie with something close to a lullaby. ‘Hush-a, hush-a, hush now, my good brave girl.’

‘Miss Rossiter’s right, you know, Mr Faulds,’ said Harry, and a couple of the maids nodded in support of him. ‘The less traipsing about and touching stuff there is, the easier the coppers’ll see what happened. If there’s footprints or the likes.’

‘No’ like you to be on the side of the law, Harry,’ said John.

‘I should have been consulted,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘It’s only what’s right and proper. I should have decided whether to telephone the police station. I’ve no intention of touching anything.’ But his actions belied his words; he was shifting from foot to foot, inches from the door, and shooting its locked handle endless darting glances, like a puppy who had been trained not to scratch at things but was dying to.

‘Oh, Mr Faulds, please,’ I said. ‘If you had seen it you’d wish you hadn’t. There’s nothing right and proper to be done about it any way you look. And I’m not trying to take centre-stage, I assure you. Let’s please all go back downstairs and wait for the police. If they need someone to show them round, you can volunteer for that – I’m sure I don’t want to.’

At that moment, the question was decided for us by Eldry, who fainted, sinking into her skirts and then half rolling a few steps down the stairs. John and Harry gathered her up between them and fought over her for a moment or two, then John relinquished her with a grin.

‘I hope she comes to before you put her down,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t want to miss this. Anybody else feeling dicky?’ he asked, turning to the other girls and flexing his arms.

‘Shut up with your stupid jokes for once,’ said Harry, turning away and beginning to feel his way down the steps. ‘It’s not the time.’

John tried mugging to the girls but they threw him their severest looks and trotted anxiously after Harry and his still unconscious cargo. John, his cheeks aflame, followed them. I had been looking at Mattie, the hall boy, who was dangerously white-looking, and I went over to him, put an arm across his back and walked down after the others holding him up firmly.

‘Thanks, Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘Sorry to be so-’

‘Ch-ch,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been closer to fainting in my life, my dear. Don’t say another word about it.’ In truth, though, I was wondering why he – who had seen nothing of the horrors – should be so affected, but I filed the question away for later; after all I barely knew the child and perhaps this was his norm.

Above us, Stanley was speaking in a low and rather thrilled voice.

‘Terrible thing, Mr Faulds,’ he said. ‘Shocking the way she just waltzed in and took over. I don’t want to see it – I’m as sick as a dog just thinking about it – but if you want to get the spare key and go for a look-see I’ll stand watch for you.’

‘Oh, stop sucking up for once,’ said Mr Faulds.

Three policemen arrived at the door and two of them climbed the stairs, sounding very solemn and deliberate as they did so. I was with Lollie, having changed places with Mrs Hepburn shortly after the mass gathering on the landing had broken up. Eldry had been put to bed with a hot bottle and the steady Phyllis watching over her, and Mattie had been given the honour of one of the servants’ hall armchairs and the more pertinent remedy of hot sweet tea.

Lollie sat absolutely motionless in a small armchair staring straight ahead of her. She had a shawl over her shoulders and there was a fire in the grate – Mrs Hepburn’s work, I imagined – but she was white and pinched-looking and she turned her head only very slowly when a firm knock sounded and a large man in a dark suit entered along with a uniformed sergeant.

‘Superintendent Hardy, Mrs Balfour,’ he said in a strained voice. Lollie stared back without blinking, but I must have reacted since he turned to me and explained. ‘We’ve suspended leave and called in all the specials while the strike’s running, and every one of my inspectors and sergeants is busy organising them so it fell to me.’

‘I see,’ said Lollie. ‘Well, thank you for coming at all, Mr Hardy.’

The large man looked rather grim at that, perhaps seeing an unintended slight or suspecting irony. Actually, I thought Lollie’s tone – the careless sound of her voice – arose from disbelief, from a simple inability to take in what was happening.

‘I assure you, my dear madam,’ said Superintendent Hardy, ‘you will receive our utmost attention until this matter is resolved. I shall see to it personally.’ His voice and his bulk were reassuring although there was some subtle kind of panic in his eyes. Still, Lollie nodded.

‘Of course, of course,’ she said.

‘Now, it’s your husband, I believe?’ he said. ‘Met with a nasty mishap? Where is he?’

Mr Faulds was hovering behind Superintendent Hardy and he stepped forward now.

‘In his bedroom, sir, if you might allow me to escort you.’

‘And you are?’ Hardy nodded at the sergeant, who opened his notebook.

‘Ernest Faulds, the butler.’

‘Well, Faulds, if you’ll just point us in the right direction we’ll take over from here.’

‘It’s locked, Superintendent,’ I said, and he turned to look at me. ‘I thought it was best. I have the key, but I’m sorry to tell you that – in all the confusion – I didn’t stop to think about prints; I just grabbed it, so there’s probably no point in worrying about them now.’ I took the key out of my pocket and offered it to him.

‘Thank you, Miss…?’

That was the question I had been trying to answer for myself since I first stepped towards Pip’s bed and saw the bloodstain. Was this the end of Miss Rossiter? Surely it must be, and yet not only would I give anything to be able to stay in her skin a little longer now that matters had taken this hideous turn, but there was the problem of where my duty lay. As I considered the point, all of a sudden I thought I knew what lay behind the look of unease in Hardy’s eyes. His inspectors and sergeants were policing this stupid strike and he had been left nursing the screaming baby, holding the ticking bomb. And if he could not read the shock in a widow’s voice – whether it were the shock of grief or the shock of what she had done, if she had done it – could he solve a murder? Could he, plucked out from behind his desk and thrown back into the torrent of an investigation for the first time in years perhaps – and there was something about him, the crisp cuffs, clean nails and careful arrangement of his glossy hair, which made me sure it was years – but anyway, could he be trusted to do it without me?

‘Miss…?’ he prompted, and the very fact that he seemed not to have gleaned any of what was surging through me, right before his eyes, had almost made my mind up when Lollie spoke, looking awake again, and aware of what was around her.

‘Miss Rossiter, my lady’s maid,’ she said. I shelved the decision, telling myself that the body was their first priority, that it would be an annoyance and a distraction to them to start a long and confusing story about my identity right now.

‘Fanny Rossiter, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘I, with one other, found him, you know.’

Mr Hardy took the key from me and I was glad to see that he – finally – gave me a searching look as he did so. Miss Rossiter’s vowels and manner of speaking had completely deserted me and even Mr Hardy must know that I was no ordinary maid.

‘This way, sir,’ said Mr Faulds, and they left Lollie and me alone.

‘Please don’t tell them who you are, Dandy,’ she whispered to me as soon as they were gone. ‘If they know that I thought he was going to hurt me they’ll think I hurt him. They’ll think I only asked you to come to give me an alibi and they’ll arrest me and put me in jail and I’d die. I couldn’t stand to be locked up in a jail cell. Oh, please, promise me. Or ask-’ She broke off with a cry. ‘I was going to say, ask Pip,’ she said. ‘He would know what to do. He would be able to help. Oh! Oh, Pip!’ Then she put her head down into her hands and began crying hard, sobs racking her chest as though she were choking.

I am afraid to say that although I sprang to her side and comforted her, with a great deal of hair-patting and shushing, I was thinking all the while that the police, looking around themselves and seeing a neatly acquired alibi, would have a point. Her state of shock was convincing enough – no one can make her face go pale at will – and the reality of the current tears could not be questioned, soaking her face and hands as they were and coming complete with a great deal of wet sniffing, but whether they were born of grief, remorse or a healthy fear for her neck was another question. Tears can be turned to account with the greatest of ease if one has a gift for weeping.

At length and after a few horribly deep snorts and swallows, Lollie sat up straight again and pulled away from me. I returned to my seat.

Her eyes were purple-looking now over the pallor of her cheeks, the lashes spiked and sparkling, and, although her nose was swollen and her lips trembled, youth shone out of her. (Had I cried so hard for so long I should have been sodden and wretched and looked ninety.) She tried a smile when she saw me looking at her. It was not successful and a further two fat tears splashed down her front.

‘About the question of an alibi,’ I began. I thought I spoke kindly and with lightness, but Lollie, tears drying up in an instant, gazed back at me in horror. I decided to plough on. ‘I shall, of course, say to Superintendent Hardy that I was in your room overnight and I shall say – which is true – that I don’t think you could have left and returned without waking me, but I can’t be sure. And as to the question of whether I tell him who I am and why I’m here…’

Lollie had recovered herself a little and she spoke up stoutly.

‘I don’t expect you to lie,’ she said. ‘You can say this is your first job as a lady’s maid and that I had heard about you and wrote to ask if you would come and that it’s not what you were brought up to. All of that is quite true. And then you can stay and help find out what happened. Please say you will, Dandy. You must.’

I regarded her in silence. As truths go, the history of Miss Rossiter she had laid out was unimpressive: a forked-tongue taradiddle of the highest order and if I were to serve it up to Hardy and be found out afterwards I should be lucky to escape arrest, if not a smack on the legs with a hairbrush for the cheek of it. On the other hand, I could not bear to rip myself away from this now. And, I told myself, if she had wanted a simple alibi she could far more easily have enticed Phyllis or Clara upstairs with a story of nightmares. No one, surely, planning to murder her husband would invite a detective into the house, into the very room; I was not only Lollie Balfour’s alibi – I was the stamp of innocence branded on her with indelible ink. Still, I had to satisfy the demands of my own conscience too.

‘As I was saying,’ I continued, just as though the silent tussle had not happened, ‘I don’t think you could have got out and back. I have to check, though. Would you rather do it yourself or shall I ring down for one of the girls?’

‘Do what?’ said Lollie. ‘Check what?’

‘How much noise you’d have made getting out of bed and coming back again. I’m sorry to ask you right now, but I’d like to be able to say to Mr Hardy with confidence straight away that you couldn’t have done it.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Lollie, already on her feet and making her way to the door. We crossed the landing to her bedroom and slipped inside. I returned to the chaise, pulling the screen across in front of it, and Lollie climbed onto the bed and lay down.

‘No, get right under the blankets,’ I told her. ‘It should be as near as possible as it would have been.’

Of course sound travels further at night, but Heriot Row is a quiet street and today was a quiet day. I could hear, as I lay there, the wheels of a delivery boy’s bicycle rattling on the cobbles and some birdsong from the Queen Street gardens and then, just as Lollie began to move, a heavy horse clopped past. After the sound of its hooves and its cart wheels died away I could hear very clearly the sound of the starched sheets being pushed back, the creak of bedsprings and the padding of soft footsteps crossing the floor. The door hinge was silent enough, but the handle clicked twice and there was that dragging sound as the foot of the door passed over the carpet. Then it closed with another pair of clicks, the footsteps sounded again and the bedsprings protested even more loudly as she climbed back in. It was impossible to ignore, but would it have awakened me?

‘I tried to be as quiet as I could,’ Lollie said softly. ‘After all, I would have, wouldn’t I?’

I got up and rounded the screen, giving her a reassuring smile.

‘Indeed you would,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ Then we both jumped at the sound of movement out on the landing and Lollie paled again; the little task I had set her had taken her mind away from the nightmare for a moment but now it returned.

‘Are they moving him?’ she asked. I shook my head.

‘No, they won’t be moving him for quite a while,’ I said. ‘The police doctor will have to come. Later today perhaps, but not now.’

‘And’ – she gulped a little – ‘will I have to look at him?’ I could not help closing my eyes briefly as the picture of Pip’s face flashed through my mind again.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Someone will have to identify him formally at some point but it needn’t be you, dear. It needn’t be a relative at all, just someone who knew him. Perhaps Mr Faulds? He’s desperate to help in some way.’

Lollie sat back against her pillows.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Faulds will take care of it for me. Poor thing. Do you think I’m wicked, Dandy, not to want to see him? Should I, do you think? I’ve never seen anyone… dead before.’

‘Don’t think about it just yet,’ I said to her. ‘You might feel different in a day or two.’ I went over and stood beside her bed, taking her hand and trying to chafe some warmth into it. ‘People will tell you it’s best to remember him as he was and others will tell you it helps to see his body, but no one really knows, so don’t listen if they pretend to.’

‘It all seems like a dream,’ said Lollie. ‘Not just this morning, I mean. The trouble – you being here, everything I was so scared of. All I can think of now is that bumblebee in the tennis net and how gentle he was and how much fun we always had.’

She looked very small sitting there in her bed, and I squeezed the hand I was holding.

‘Isn’t there anyone I could telephone to?’ I said. ‘There must be someone who could come?’

‘My Great Aunt Gertrude from Inverness, I suppose,’ said Lollie. ‘She doesn’t hold with the telephone but I could send a telegram to her.’

I did not like the sound of Great Aunt Gertrude from Inverness somehow; in my experience old ladies who do not hold with the telephone tend not to hold with a great deal besides, such as large fires, soft cushions and cocktails. Aunt Gertrude sounded to me like a bracing walk made flesh.

‘Are there friends one could summon for you?’ I said. I often feel as encumbered by friends and family as a horse is with flies in August, twitching at them to leave me alone and dreaming of tranquil solitude; it was hard to believe that this girl could be quite so alone.

‘We were everything to one another,’ Lollie told me. ‘I never saw the danger in that until now.’

I squeezed her hand again, hoping to head off another bout of weeping, and was glad to hear the heavy tread of feet stumping up the stairs. There was a little quiet murmuring out on the landing and then Mrs Hepburn appeared, carrying a covered basin.

‘I’ve got some-’ she said and then stopped and frowned. ‘You’ve never put her back in her bed in her frock, Fanny! Come on, madam, out you get and back into your nightie. I’ve got some bread soup for you but it’s fair hot yet anyway so we’ve plenty time till it’s ready to sup.’ I turned to go, but Mrs Hepburn laid a hand on my arm and spoke in a low voice. ‘You’ll forgive me, Fan, won’t you? I shouldn’t have ticked you off like that, but I’m just all upside down and it slipped out. I beg your pardon, though.’

‘Don’t mention it, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said, thinking if that was Miss Rossiter being ticked off then there were no words for what Dandy Gilver née Leston had received from the tongues of Nanny Palmer, Madame Toulemonde and Grant over the years. ‘I’ll get back downstairs to them all if you’ll stay with mistress now.’

Mrs Hepburn dropped her voice even further and turned partly away.

‘I think you’re wanted next door,’ she said. ‘But see and get a port with brandy from Mr Faulds when they’ve finished with you.’ I nodded. The port and brandy cure-all was a favourite with my own dear Mrs Tilling and, although I had resisted so far throughout childbirths, bereavements and a fire in the attics, I could imagine that today might be the day I succumbed to its charms. I took a deep breath and went out of the bedroom.

On the landing, Mr Hardy was standing with his hands on his hips looking about himself with a furious expression on his face. The sergeant, in contrast, leaned back against the banister rail with legs straddled well apart and a handkerchief pressed to his mouth.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Hardy, seeing me. ‘Miss eh… Miss…?’

‘Rossiter,’ I said.

‘And you found…?’ He jabbed a finger at Pip’s bedroom door.

‘With one other,’ I said. ‘Eldry. Etheldreda, the tweenie. She took the tray in but she didn’t lift the sheet.’

‘You liftit the sheet?’ said the sergeant, looking at me with respect.

‘I had to make sure there was nothing to be done,’ I said. ‘I mean, I could tell there was a great deal of blood but there was just a chance he was still alive. I was a nurse in the war.’

Mr Hardy tugged his coat straight and tweaked his cuffs – girded his loins, in fact, for the task ahead.

‘In that case, Miss Rossiter,’ he said, ‘we’ll start with you. Now. Downstairs, I think. There must be a room that’s not in use this morning. And Sergeant Mackenzie? You go and find a telephone and get the surgeon and see if there’s anyone in the station who can slip along with some fingerprinting… things and if not… And tell PC Morrison to round up the rest of the servants and keep an eye on them all until we can…’

‘Right you are, sir,’ said Sergeant Mackenzie, sparing Hardy from the problem of ever ending this speech. ‘I’ll get straight to it.’

I led Superintendent Hardy downstairs and into the back parlour where Lollie had held the interviews. The fire was unlit, which gave a cheerless air to the place, but the day was warm enough to do without one. Hardy sat at the little papier mâché writing table (looking a lot like the big bad wolf looming over the house of sticks) and opened a new notebook at the first page. I sat on the same hard wooden seat as before and reported the story of meeting Eldry on the stairs, of hearing her scream, running to her aid and letting her out of the bedroom door. I was just about to go on and tell the superintendent about what I had seen under the sheet, when he interrupted me.

‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Why did she lock herself in in the first place?’

‘No, you misunderstand me,’ I told him. ‘The main door was still locked from the night before. Eldry had gone through the dressing room – the bathroom.’

‘And that was open?’ said the superintendent. ‘Now, why would the murderer close one door and leave the other open?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘They were both locked up tight. The key to the door of the little hallway that leads into the dressing room is kept on the lintel and Eldry let herself in with it.’

‘One of these Yale locks?’ he said. I nodded. ‘And the key of the main door was on the inside when you got there?’ I nodded again. ‘Good God,’ he said and glared at me. ‘You see what this means, don’t you?’

‘I do, sir,’ I replied.

‘I’ve been thinking someone must have got in. Even though there’s nothing missing as far as we could see. There was quite a bit of disturbance last night here and there. I suppose I thought some devil had broken in but…’

‘But only someone who knew the house well would know about the Yale key,’ I finished for him. ‘And actually, Superintendent, the house as a whole was very secure last night. Mr Faulds, the butler, was locking up when I went to bed. He’s a bit of a stickler for it by all accounts.’

‘Good God,’ said Hardy again. ‘This is going to be an all-out scandal. This is going to need seeing to.’ He could not have looked less keen to do the seeing if he had sprinted for the door and pounded on it begging for release, but he squared his shoulders and sat up a little straighter. ‘Right then. I’ll need a list of everyone who was in the house and I’ll need to speak to them all. I’ll need your full name to start with.’

‘Yes indeed,’ I said. ‘Well, then. I’m employed under the name of Frances Rossiter. Miss.’ Superintendent Hardy looked up at me with his pencil in mid-air. ‘My married name is Gilver,’ I went on. ‘That is to say, my real name is Dandelion Dahlia Gilver. When I took this job, I changed it. My relations would not otherwise countenance my employment, I don’t suppose.’

‘Gilver,’ said the superintendent, looking thoughtful ‘Gilver?’

‘It’s a prominent name in Perthshire,’ I said and Hardy nodded. ‘I thought it best to change it under the circumstances.’

Hardy looked at me for a while without speaking and I did my best to meet his gaze square-on. He was not, I thought, an unintelligent man, only rather flustered by this extraordinary day. Perhaps he had come in sideways from the army straight to his desk and had never gathered statements and tracked suspects before. He certainly had nothing cunning about him, but rather the unstoppable look of someone who spent his youth being pushed to the front of the team in games of rugby football. Yes, that was it! If I had passed him on the street I should have guessed that he was a very prosperous and still rather sporting Borders beef farmer; he was completely out of his element sitting here today.

‘The circumstances being that you’re working as a maid,’ he said finally.

‘Well, a companion is perhaps a better way to express it, Superintendent,’ I replied. ‘Mrs Balfour is not – was not – happily married and she felt herself in need of a champion, while she considered what to do about it, but she felt also that her husband wouldn’t be pleased to think she had turned to someone for help and so I was smuggled in, I suppose you would say. As her maid. To help.’

There was another long silence to be got through now. I waited it out, trying to look a good deal more confident than I felt.

‘And how long have you been here?’ said Hardy at last.

‘Since yesterday,’ I replied. ‘I arrived at teatime.’

He put down his pencil and folded his hands on top of the notebook. His jaw, which was square enough even at rest, now stuck out in the most marked fashion.

‘You arrived yesterday, using a false name,’ he said, and I noticed for the first time how deeply shadowed his eyes were under the strong brow, ‘to help Mrs Balfour with the problem of her husband.’

I often tell myself that after years of constant detecting my days of naivety are in the past, that no longer do I put on my red cloak and set off for my grandmother’s cottage with a basket of treats, but it was not until that very moment that I saw the forest of trees pressing in all around me and realised that being used as an alibi was not the worst suspicion which could fall upon me.

‘Superintendent Hardy,’ I said, all thought of subtlety vanished, ‘do you know an inspector called Cruickshank from Linlithgowshire?’

‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Hardy. ‘I can’t say I remember ever meeting the fellow.’

‘Or how about Inspector Hutchinson, from the Perthshire Force?’ I asked. Superintendent Hardy’s stern face split into a grin.

‘Maynard Hutchinson?’ he said. ‘Everybody knows him. The stories I could tell you about him would make your hair curl.’

‘Well, then telephone to him and ask him about-’

‘Mrs Gilver!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘Dandy Gilver?’

‘At your service,’ I said, letting out a huge sigh of relief. ‘Truly, Superintendent: at your service and awaiting instructions.’

‘So what was all that about a companion?’

‘All true,’ I said. ‘More or less. Mrs Balfour called me in to help her. To be a witness to her husband’s behaviour and a champion of her cause. He was a complete brute, you know. I don’t imagine anyone will be mourning him once the shock has passed over.’

‘Sounds to me as if she’s dropped you right in it, madam,’ Hardy said.

I held up my hand.

‘Miss Rossiter, Superintendent, please. Not madam. If I’m to stay here and help I need Fanny Rossiter more than ever, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Ah now, I don’t know what I think of that,’ said Hardy. ‘You saw him up there – what had been done to him. You could be in grave danger, and I can’t let a civilian – not to mention a lady – risk herself that way.’

‘Oh come now, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you just tell us that you had called in all sorts of extraordinary manpower to handle the strike?’

‘Retired officers and territorial soldiers and suchlike,’ said Hardy.

‘Well, what’s one more? I’ll even sign a contract if it would help.’

So it was that Superintendent Hardy allowed the ranks of his constabulary to be swelled by one more volunteer and I became a special constable of the Edinburgh City Police. For all I know, I might still be one; I do not recall any formal release from my duties anyway.

‘Here, you haven’t got the dog with you, have you?’ asked Hardy. ‘Don’t tell me you brought the dog.’

‘I haven’t, in fact,’ I said. I could only imagine what the caustic Mr Hutchinson had said about my beloved Bunty at whatever policemen’s shindig he had enlivened with tales of our adventures.

‘Just as well,’ said Hardy, and returned to business, with another great roll of the powerful shoulders and another answering creak from the delicate chair in which he was sitting. ‘So. Miss Rossiter. Do you have your own room or can you account for any of the other maids?’ ‘Other’ was said with a bit of a twinkle, but I knew that my answer would soon snuff that out. If, that was, I could bring myself to deliver it.

‘I owe Mrs Balfour whatever loyalty I can give her,’ I said.

‘But?’ said Mr Hardy.

‘But,’ I went on, ‘as I’ve had occasion to point out to earlier clients in past cases, I am not a “hired gun”.’ Hardy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘My children,’ I said. ‘Dreadful taste in story papers. What I am, come what may and no matter who is paying me, is a servant of truth.’

‘So…?’ asked Mr Hardy.

So… I told him, feeling like the worst kind of sneak, especially as he clearly thought that Lollie installing me in her very bedroom was getting on for elaborate and roused suspicion rather than quashing it.

‘But I don’t think she could have got out and back without me noticing,’ I said. ‘Although…’ A further and even more damning possibility had just occurred to me.

‘Although what?’ said Hardy.

‘She shoved a nightcap down me with some insistence. If I were to lay my hands on the glass, could it be tested to see if she’d put some kind of sleeping powder in it? I mean, I’m sure she didn’t but it would be good to be able to discount it completely.’

Hardy gave me a sharp nod of approval and agreement, then rubbed his jaw again.

‘What about washing?’ he asked. ‘Even if she had you doped up – and let’s hope not, eh? – could she have run the hot water without waking the house? I know I couldn’t in my bathroom but this place seems pretty plush and maybe the plumbing is silent.’

‘Why do you assume…?’ I said and then stopped.

‘There would have been a fair amount of blood,’ said Hardy, confirming what I thought. ‘She – or whoever – would have had to wash at least the hands and arms.’

‘In that case, I think not,’ I said. ‘Certainly, I don’t think she could have used her own bathroom. And I don’t really think she slipped me a powder and I don’t even think she killed her husband. But…’

‘But if it’s not her then who is it? I only wish you had been here longer, Miss Rossiter, and could tell me a little about the household.’

‘I can tell you a surprising lot,’ I said, and this time I felt no compunction. ‘I only met Mr Balfour briefly and he seemed perfectly pleasant then but – as I say – he was not well loved, Superintendent. Not by the maids anyway.’ Mr Hardy gave me a look which seemed to enquire whether it were the age-old problem. I threw a look back confirming that indeed it was. He sighed. ‘And rather an extreme case,’ I said. ‘There have been two recent departures: a Miss Abbott, my predecessor, and a kitchenmaid, Maggie, who flounced off on Saturday night. Phyllis, the housemaid, is on notice as we speak.’

‘On notice, eh?’ said Mr Hardy. ‘That’s interesting.’

‘But could a woman have done it?’ I asked.

Hardy shrugged.

‘The doctor will be able to tell us more about that,’ he said. ‘Have you heard anything from any of those strapping lads downstairs to make you think one of them might have wanted to kill him?’

I thought back to the evening before, John teasing Harry about the use of the razor. Surely he was only teasing? Still, I had wondered how someone of Harry’s views could bear to be a servant, and a valet at that – the most intimate of servant-master relationships, surely. And then what had been wrong with Mattie this morning? And why was Mr Faulds so very desperate to get into the murder room and so very angry at my preventing him?

‘There’s a lot of chattering,’ I said. ‘Probably nothing more than chattering, but still – I think it would be worth your while interviewing all of the staff very closely.’

‘I’ll speak to Mrs Balfour first,’ said Hardy. ‘Then start on the fainting tweenie. If you would just go and tell them? Also, say to that Mrs Whatsername – the cook – to go and join the others, would you? And don’t forget the glass.’

It was gone from where I had left it on the small table by the chaise, but before I chased after it to the kitchens I pulled back the covers on Lollie’s bed and scrutinised the sheets, top and bottom, for it had occurred to me that I had seen no more of her than her head before she had hurried off to her bath earlier that morning and, if Superintendent Hardy were right about the blood, there might be traces of it here somewhere. But the linen was white and fresh, hardly even creased, and smelling faintly of lavender and of Lollie’s Heure Bleue. The same scents were mingled in her drawers and in the trays of her wardrobe, where nightdresses and underclothes lay in orderly, crisp-edged piles. There was no way she could have stuffed any bloodstained articles in there, even if she could have opened the drawers and doors without wakening me. I went into the bathroom, where there were more neat arrangements, of towels this time, and no sign of anything rolled up or stuffed away where it should not be except my own nightgown. I held her hand towel up to the light from the bedroom doorway and could see not the slightest mark upon it. I turned on the sprinklers of the shower-bath and, as I had suspected, it sounded like rain on a tin roof, impossible for anyone – sleeping powder or none – to sleep through. Even the taps of the hand basin gurgled and spat loud enough to wake anyone in the next room.

There was a photograph of Pip Balfour in a frame on the little enamelled cupboard where the towels were stored. He was standing on the deck of a yacht, his shirtsleeves rolled high and his collar open, laughing and squinting into the sun.

‘I don’t think she did it,’ I said to him. ‘Even if you deserved her to.’ I stood staring at the picture until all the water had drained away and the bathroom was silent again. Then I shook myself back into motion, turned from him and sped down the flights of stairs to the kitchens, hoping I was not too late already.

‘And as to what we’re supposed to do for our dinners, Fanny, your guess is as good as mine,’ said Mrs Hepburn, striking in medias res as I entered the main kitchen. ‘If I just sit in the hall all the morning, that is, which I can’t, no more than I can work with the rest of them under my feet in here.’ She glared at a police constable – Morrison, one presumed – who was trying to melt into the wall behind him and failing.

‘The super tellt me I was to keep you all together, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said. ‘Just until he’s had a chance to talk to you all. He’ll kill me if he finds out you’re in here and they’re in there.’ He jerked a thumb at the wall which separated the kitchen from the servants’ hall.

‘Can’t Sergeant Mackenzie stay with the others?’ I asked.

‘Millie, how many times?’ broke in Mrs Hepburn. ‘You flour for dough and grease for pastry. Now wipe that off and try again.’ Millie, dusted with flour all down her apron, in her hair, on both cheeks and one spectacle lens, dropped her ball of pastry back into its bowl, bobbed and scurried out to fetch a cloth. Mrs Hepburn blew upwards into her hair, took hold of the frilled collar of her dress and shook it, letting a draught in about her neck.

‘You’ve got me snapping at my own niece now!’ she said to PC Morrison, who ignored her.

‘The sarge is away back to the station,’ he said to me. ‘He couldnae get a line to ring them.’

‘Are the telephonists on strike?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think so.’

‘No,’ said Morrison, ‘but they’re overloaded with everybody ringing everybody else to say how they cannae get to wherever they’re supposed to be with no buses on and the exchange said to the sarge that half of them are telling her they’re the police or a doctor to make her break in and he could go and whistle.’

‘I’m sure it will be all right to leave the others in the hall with Mr Faulds to watch them, Constable,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Hardy probably just meant that we shouldn’t be allowed to swarm all over the house.’

‘There! See?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Miss Rossiter thinks the same as me. So let’s all go through and have a cup of tea and a wee bite and take that blooming helmet off before you melt.’ She picked up an enormous teapot and nodded to PC Morrison to carry a cooling tray of buns, then left at her usual pace.

‘Her bark and her bite are both hopeless,’ I told the constable, who nodded, smiling but still looking a little scared. I guessed that Hardy’s bark was deafening and his bite fatal.

In the scullery, Millie had been distracted and was guddling potatoes in a deep basin of water. The disordered morning was clear to see in the piles of unwashed breakfast dishes ranged about on the wooden draining boards, one plate even still half-covered with rashers of congealing bacon. And there too was what I had been hoping to find: the pair of brandy glasses from Lollie’s imposed nightcap the evening before. I could not tell which was mine and so I took them both, holding them down at my sides to hide them. She had been very insistent upon my drinking up and if she had put some kind of powder in my glass to make me sleep through disruptions, there was bound to be a trace of it left in the dregs at the bottom. I slipped out again without Millie hearing me and flitted down to my own room.

When I opened the door, it was to the sound of water and I stood still for a moment and listened. This could not be Millie and her potatoes away in the offshoot at the other side of the house. Very quietly, I turned the handle of the laundry-room door and looked in. Eldry was there, her arms deep in a sinkful of soap suds. For a moment I watched her in silence, but she must have sensed my presence because suddenly she wheeled around. I started backwards, banging my heel against the door jamb and cracking one of the brandy glasses as my hand clenched around it. Eldry was backing away too, pressing herself up against the sink, wiping her hands on her apron and staring at me like a dog which expects to be kicked.

‘Please don’t be angry, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘I would have gone out to the wash-house at the back of the coalhole there, but that first policeman said we were no’ to leave the house.’

‘And what about the second policeman?’ I said. ‘He was supposed to be keeping you all together.’

‘I slipped out,’ said Eldry, ‘when they were talking in the passageway. He’s no’ really counted us all up yet, I don’t think.’

‘I see. And what are you doing, exactly?’

She glanced back at the soapy water and bit down on her bottom lip, making her teeth more prominent than ever.

‘Try – trying to get the blood out,’ she said.

I felt the hairs move on the back of my neck and I spoke gently.

‘What’s got blood on it, Eldry?’

‘My clothes,’ she said. ‘My dress and when I took my dress off it got on everything.’

‘And how did you get blood on your dress?’ I was clutching the cracked glass even tighter now, wondering if I could bring myself to use it if she were to fly at me.

‘From him,’ she said. ‘Upstairs. Master.’