The Winter Ground

9

The police, as might be expected given the lateness of the hour, the treacherous icy cold of the night and the miles of twisting road between Blairgowrie town and Benachally, took an age to arrive. By the time the rather creaky old Belsize came rumbling into the clearing, Ma Cooke and I were frozen to our marrow by that slow, creeping chill which only comes from standing about in cheerless surroundings for purposes drear. I have most often felt it when following guns, tramping over wintry moors and standing statue-still pretending to watch Hugh blast away at grouse for hours on end, but the longest, darkest, dullest day of shooting in my memory or imagining could not produce even a fraction of the hopeless cold which engulfed me, engulfed both of us, in the dim corner by the doorway of the tent that dreadful night.

Of course, it was not only the cold that was the trouble. On the ground between us, although the light was low and the huddled shape quite small so that one should have been able to overlook it lying there, Anastasia seemed to glow and even glitter as though with movement and one had to make efforts, over and over again, to look away. Perhaps there was movement; there must have been – her hair bright and soft in the lamplight might have settled gradually against the ground; certainly from the way her costume winked the sequins must have been shifting somehow although there was no breeze. And there were sounds, which was worst of all. Once, a sigh, unmistakable, and other sounds too, infrequent and faint, but they kept us silent, catching at our breaths and straining to hear any more.

At each soft terrible sound, each hint of settling movements, impossible, unbearable, Ma Cooke moaned gently to herself and once I heard her whisper, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ almost too quiet to be heard.

It was my first experience of spending this time – this slow and gradual dying time – with someone who, as Mrs Cooke put it, is leaving; my first lesson that we do leave gradually, the body rather more reluctantly letting go than the soul. I had seen people die before that night, several times in the officers’ convalescent home in the war when it turned out that some young man was not convalescing at all, but was dying of something so swift and inevitable that there was no reason, sometimes no time, to move him. I had even seen violent death before – twice since taking up this new occupation of mine – and it had its horrors, but I had never stood sentinel like this while the coil was left to its slow unwinding.

No particular wonder, then, that the arrival of the police, far from striking the final note of despondency one might have expected, seemed rather more a welcome relief. Certainly the two large constables and the sharp-eyed sergeant did well to avoid having me fall upon their necks when they lumbered in.

Inspector Hutchinson did not inspire anything like such confidence at first glance. His hair was rather long for a policeman and a kind of defeated grey in colour. His moustache was grey too and drooped down low on either side of his long mouth. Brows high in the middle and low at the ends and heavy pouches under his eyes only added to the impression, and the bluish mottled cheeks hinted not even just at weariness but positively at drink.

Sergeant McClennan took care of the first formalities. Ma identified herself as Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Sergeant McClennan extracted a full measure of sighing and rubbing out before he had got it down, working off the frustrations of his own pointlessly elaborate name, I thought, which must have given him a lifetime of mishearings and misspellings even in his native land. (I have often wondered why anyone perseveres with the endless MacLellands and McLennans and MacClements, when they are obviously exactly the same thing, appearing distinct only because of the early – and let us face it, not so early – illiteracy of the Highland clans.)

‘And this?’ said the sergeant, pointing to Ana with the end of his pencil, once he had got Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Dandelion Dahlia Gilver printed out in neat letters and had got his eyebrows down again.

‘Anastasia,’ said Ma.

‘Oh aye?’ said the sergeant.

‘I can’t tell you her surname, for I never knew it myself,’ Ma went on, ‘but it’ll be with her papers in her wagon there and someone’ll find it for you.’

‘Aye, right,’ said the sergeant.

‘What my sergeant means is we’ll take care of that, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson rather more diplomatically. He stepped forward and crouched beside Ana, lifting her hair and shining his electric torch into her eyes. I looked away.

‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘Just a girl, isn’t she? Twenty? Twenty-five?’

‘Couldn’t have been much more, if that even,’ said Ma, and her voice was tremulous. The inspector stood up again.

‘Well, how about we away somewhere into the warm and let my lads take over watching her?’ he said gently. ‘I think you could do with a cup of tea, Mrs Cooke, at least. Let’s away and you tell me all about it, eh?’

In the Cookes’ wagon, over strong, sweet tea laced with whisky, which made me retch and shudder but certainly warmed me, Inspector Hutchinson drew the story of the evening out of Ma, Pa, Alec and me. Sergeant McClennan sat with his notebook in one hand, pencil in the other, looking like nothing so much as a small boy with a net and jar waiting for butterflies to flutter into range, but the inspector’s questions were quite benign.

‘Mr Truman, Mr Merryman and a Mr Cooke,’ he said. ‘A relation?’

‘My brother,’ said Pa, ‘but you must understand, just because they were behind the doors, that doesn’t mean they saw her. They’d just as easy have been in their wee place, getting propped for the first spot, and Ana – well, she’ll have gone straight through most like. There’s a horse tent by the back doors. Not the proper stalls, they’re down away separate, but a strawed tent where the prads go between spots, and Ana will have trotted Harlequin straight there, straight past the clowns. They’ll not have seen nothing.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll have a word with them anyway, though. Anyone else?’

‘I was back there,’ said Ma. ‘And Bill Wolf too. He wun’t in the spec tonight, but he was running on and he was waiting ready. Lally Wolf too, getting little Tommy togged to run on with his pa.’

‘And what did you see?’ said the inspector. ‘What can you tell me?’

Ma Cooke looked at him for a long time before she spoke, and the hesitation was so out of character for her, the slow careful look so unlike her, that I found myself watching her closely. I saw her considering her answer, screwing herself up towards courage and then, at the last chance, with her breath already gathered in to begin speaking, subsiding again, sinking back into her chair, shaking her head a little even.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was in by Zoya’s trunks there, getting the shawls ready for them little maids. Cold as it was, I’d thought to put them round hot bricks and so I was unwinding them again ready for the spec coming off. I din’t see nothing.’

‘Did you hear anything?’ said the inspector.

‘Heard the clowns come off,’ Ma said.

‘Anything else, Mrs Cooke?’

Once again, Ma Cooke took her time to answer.

‘You must understand,’ she said at last, ‘that it was noisy from the ring all this while, see? I can’t be sure, but I think – think, mind – I think Tiny and Andrew went straight to their table and so they wun’t have seen nothing. That right, Pa? They take care of the props, most usually, ’count of Charlie is the boss, see?’

‘Boss of the clowns, she means,’ said Pa. ‘I’m the boss of the circus.’

‘Well, I beg your pardon, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson, ‘but it’s no use telling me what should have happened, according to the rules. I really need to know what you heard. What you actually heard, see?’

‘And in’t that what I’m saying?’ said Ma. ‘I heard two of them go to the props table. Two sets of boots on the boards. All I’m telling you there is what two it was, most likely.’

‘And the third?’

‘Charlie? I can’t say where he was. I din’t hear him passing and he din’t call out to anyone. Most likely,’ she held up her hand as if to acknowledge the inspector’s objection before he raised it, ‘I wun’t put my hand to a bible on it, you’re right there, but most likely he’d go to the back door and have his smoke.’

‘And when you say the back door, you mean the door where she fell?’

Ma opened her eyes very wide and put her hand to her mouth.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘I din’t mean nothing by it. I din’t see him nor hear him. I shun’t of spoke up at all there, really.’

What was she playing at? I was not fooled for a moment by the hand clapped to the mouth and the look of surprise. She had deliberately dropped Charlie Cooke right in it. I was not alone in being troubled. Pa’s chest was rising and falling rather rapidly, the spangles on his lapels winking in the lamplight, and he chewed on the ends of his moustache as he watched her.

‘I’ll start with Mr Cooke then,’ said the inspector. ‘He might be able to clear all of this up and let us away to our beds, eh?’

‘He never said a word, Poll,’ said Pa, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘When we were all together with the poor lass. He said not a word.’

‘Aye, but still,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘he wurr shaken up bad, wun’t he? He might have been too upset by it all to speak. Mind you,’ she went on, ‘if it wurr me I’d start by asking myself why she come off when she did. I’d start by asking them ring lads and little Sal on the Panatrope what they saw, cos of no one else could see what happened behind them liberty horses, could they?’

Now it was my turn to catch my lip. What was she doing? She had set the inspector on to Charlie Cooke as surely as pointing her finger and crying ‘J’accuse’ and now my poor boys were to be tossed into the fray too.

‘And where might I find those three?’ said the inspector.

‘Little Sallie Wolf’s in the second wagon before the pond over the ways there,’ said Ma, ‘and…’ She looked over at me, rather belatedly it seemed to me.

‘Yes,’ I said, for there was no use trying to avoid it. ‘The ring boys. My sons, as a matter of fact. I’ll show you their wagon, Inspector, and I shall stay while you question them too, if you don’t mind.’ I am not proud to admit that as well as a deal of confusion, shock, a little cold still and more motherly concern than is my usual measure, I was feeling a surge of angry delight that, when one got right down to it, my boys being woken in the night to answer police questions could be laid fairly at Hugh’s door. I was almost looking forward to telling him about it.

‘Your sons,’ said the inspector in a carefully blank voice. Sergeant McClennan had looked up from his notebook too. ‘I see. Yes, I had been wondering how you fitted in exactly, Mrs Gilver. Your sons, yes, I see.’

I attempted an explanation as we crossed the ground, Alec hindering rather than helping with his tuppenceworth, and Inspector Hutchinson could hardly be blamed if he formed the opinion that Donald and Teddy were spoiled brats, I was a clinging fusspot, Hugh was indifferent to all three of us, and Alec was so lost to decency that he not only trailed around the countryside after me to dinner parties, married woman or no, but did not trouble to keep away from my impressionably aged sons, who thought of him as a kind of uncle. Actually, the last of these points was not too far from the truth, but it is always a bother to have such people as the inspector cast an eye over one’s perfectly blameless existence and draw their own thrilling conclusions, for the shopkeeper class – being by far the most rigidly proper and as a result the most filthy-minded – do tend to gasp and fan themselves at the very ideas they alone are entertaining. As Grant says about the seamstress in Gilverton village who makes her frocks: shocked to the core, tell me more.

The touch of Alec’s hand to my arm as we neared the shepherds’ hut was especially unwelcome, then, but when I ignored him he tugged quite urgently and I could see his eyes flash. He jerked his head backwards the way we had come and I turned just in time to see a shape moving along behind the wagons on the far side of the ground. It was a shortish, roundish shape, moving swiftly. At a guess, I should have said it was Ma Cooke and the steps she slipped silently up and the door she eased silently open were Charlie’s.

‘Now then, Mrs Gilver,’ said the inspector, stopping at the shepherds’ hut. ‘You had best go in first and wake them. We don’t want them alarmed.’ The alarm, though, was all mine for the little hut was empty, the stove cold, the bedrolls nowhere to be seen.

At least that should convince the inspector that I was not the clinging type, I thought to myself, but I did feel a growing sense of something or other. Had I even given them a glance as I made my way back to Ana earlier? Had I simply swept past? Was it possible that hours later they were still sitting there on the ring fence as I had told them to? Words cannot express the surge of relief I felt at the sound of a door latch lifting and Zoya’s voice calling gently from the nearest wagon pair.

‘They are here, Mee-zuss Kilvert,’ she said. ‘Asleep like babies. All good, all well.’

We trooped over to the Prebrezhenskys’ wagon and crowded around the door. Zoya and Kolya were sitting wrapped in dressing gowns with glasses of tea and Donald and Teddy were indeed fast asleep, top to tail, in a little wheeled cot which had been trundled out from under the box-bed. Inya and Alya were sleeping cheek to cheek in another and little Ilya waved drowsily at us from a canvas hammock strung above them. Bunty was in front of the stove, on her back with all four paws in the air waggling gently at each breath.

‘Well, who would have the heart?’ said the inspector, his face softening as he gazed at them. ‘The morning will do, I’m thinking.’ With a nod at the adults he stepped away and closed the door softly.

‘A very touching little scene,’ he said, standing and rubbing his hands together, looking around at the ring of wagons. ‘A… taking… kind of a place, isn’t it, a circus? The more for being so precarious, these days. I can see how a body could be quite swept away with it all. I can quite see how a body could get to thinking what a shame it would be if anything came along to spoil it. They’re lost for ever once they’re gone.’

He turned, rather abruptly, to face Alec and me and switched on his torch. Of course, he did nothing so boorish as shine it in our faces – he was very careful not to – and so we did not screw up our eyes, but treated him to a clear display of expressions in which guilt, surprise and sheepishness were chasing one another around like horrid little olives being swirled in the dregs of a particularly nasty cocktail.

‘Here’s another view of it,’ he said, and for the first time there was not a trace of warmth in his voice. ‘A girl is dead. A bunch of circus folk – understandably – have got the willies from her dying and don’t much want the police about the place, and a pair of… I’d put a tanner on self-styled detectives… who should know better are playing silly beggars instead of doing their duty. Mrs Cooke has fed me her brother-in-law like a sweetie for a bairn and now she’s taken off on tiptoe to tell him what to say when I get there. Will I carry on?’

‘I can only apologise, sir,’ said Alec, who had reddened, as he has a tendency to do – such a trial for a gentleman, who has no recourse to powder. ‘It’s exactly as you said. We simply got caught up in the… Gosh, in the conspiracy to cover up a murder, I suppose you would say. I for one feel utterly-’

‘Don’t bother about all that,’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘This isn’t the officers’ mess and I don’t have time for speeches.’ Alec blushed even deeper and although I gobbled for a retort – such rudeness! – he had a point and there was no answer. ‘What I would like to know is why you are here.’

We told him. Pacing around the edges of the pond by torchlight, the frost crackling under our boots, we told him all about Ma’s premonition of doom, about the tricks played on the hapless Topsy and the tricks planned, although scuppered, for poor Anastasia.

‘This Topsy needs to be careful now,’ said the inspector. ‘She could be next, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I can see the sense in that,’ I said, ‘but I have to tell you, Inspector, our suspicions were tending in quite another direction before tonight.’

‘That Topsy did all the mischief, you mean?’ said Hutchinson. ‘That she played tricks on herself to cover her tracks? And were you alone in thinking it or was that the general view? And what might she have rigged tonight? Because she was still in the ring when it happened, wasn’t she?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Alec, with an agitated note in his voice. Stopping the inspector’s stream of ideas was a little like trying to catch up with a runaway train. ‘We didn’t mean Topsy… Quite the rev-’ His voice faded and he stood blinking. ‘But Topsy does make just as much sense, actually, Dandy. A lot more sense now, when one thinks about it.’

‘Alec, you weren’t there the day of the rope,’ I said. ‘Topsy positively hurled herself at the ground, Inspector. No one could have done that if she had known what was waiting at the bottom. I can’t think of it now without blanching.’

‘What was waiting at the bottom was a leap upwards and a bit of a sore hand,’ said the inspector. ‘And leaping around on ropes is Miss Turvy’s idea of a quiet day at home, is it not now?’ I shook my head again. ‘And if she really did “hurl” herself as you say, Mrs Gilver,’ went on the inspector, ‘she must have quite a temper.’ I fought hard against the feeling of being scooped up and swept along.

‘On the contrary, Inspector,’ I said. ‘We think, that is, Mrs Cooke voiced a suspicion to me, that it was Anastasia behind all the trouble.’

‘And so who more likely than this Topsy to pay her back, eh? Still, I need to speak to these clowns, this Bill Wolf, Topsy, your boys – with your permission, of course – and the rest of them. Any point trying to track down all the guests from the big house, do you think? Could you give me their names?’

‘Ahhh, most, I think,’ I said, checking with Alec. He nodded.

‘I should say so,’ he said with one eyebrow hooked up. ‘I’ve only been in these parts a year or two, Inspector, but even I’ve heard most of the names who were here tonight.’ He rattled off a few and Hutchinson’s eyebrows lifted too, until they were almost vertical.

‘Phew!’ he said. ‘Lady Maude MacAlpine? Really? The Stirling woman? I thought these Wilsons were the sober, respectable type, from all I’ve ever heard of them. A businessman and a schoolteacher’s daughter, aren’t they? Made their fortune and came to the hills for fresh air and views to sketch. But should I be having a look at them?’

Now, at this point, my duty was clear; at least the inspector would have said so. While assuring him that the Wilsons were the very souls of propriety, although a little odd each in his own way, and that this evening’s party was quite out of character for Benachally, I should certainly have passed on the interesting fact that when Anastasia upset the smooth running of the spectacular with her early exit, Ina Wilson was not in her seat where she should have been, but was back, breathing heavily and trying to hide it, by the time I addressed the gathering and bid them all return to the castle, their motor cars and home.

Yet all I did was shake my head. Ina Wilson? Preposterous! I looked forward to asking her just where she had been, of course, but I thought I could shield her from the inspector’s rather scorching attentions, in the meantime anyway. My conscience demanded it, for what would the man who had so efficiently cut Alec down to size make of the Wilsons if he got them in his view? After the mortifications of the early evening and the eventual travesty that the circus treat became I did not want to heap insult on them, the poor silly pair.

Watching him at work on Charlie Cooke made me very glad that my conscience had a greater measure of compassion than scruple. The inspector and his sergeant trundled into the ground the next morning in a BSA and sidecar which made even the Belsize tourer of the previous evening look sleek by comparison. Sergeant McClennan hopped off the motorcycle spryly enough, but to see the inspector unbuttoning himself from the covers and struggling out of the contraption like an overturned tortoise trying to shed its shell was a sight to be savoured.

‘Blasted thing,’ he said, tugging and twitching at his overcoat, once he was finally upright. ‘Well I remember my cosy wee perambulator when I was a bairn, and I had a sleigh ride once that was like sitting in an armchair, but that thing? Pure torture.’ He gave it a swift kick. ‘Now, Mr Charles Cooke Esquire, for you and me, madam.’

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

‘For he won’t know what to make of you,’ Hutchinson explained to me.

‘So then won’t taking me along make him more careful than ever?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Hutchinson. ‘He’s been well coached by that sister-in-law, but he knows she’s had her claws into you too and he won’t know which way to play it if we face him together. He won’t know if you’re there for Ma Cooke or for me. He’ll be tossing like a cork on the tide.’ The inspector beamed at me.

‘You are very happy in your work,’ I remarked drily.

‘Well, Mrs Gilver, it’s not a mile off your work,’ he replied, ‘and I’m assuming you weren’t conscripted.’ Once again, I was left like a trout on a bank, my mouth opening and shutting but to no purpose. It was a feeling with which I was to become familiar while Inspector Hutchinson’s path marched along with mine.

‘Mr Cooke,’ he said in the same ringing tones, when Charlie answered his knock. ‘I think you are the man I need.’ He ushered me into the wagon and followed me. ‘Mrs Gilver needs no introduction, I know,’ he went on, settling himself down with great rearrangings of the skirts to his tweed coat. As the inspector had predicted, Charlie Cooke glanced rapidly between the two of us and a frown spread over his face. I felt a little pity for the man; he could not have slept a wink in the night if his pale cheeks and red-rimmed eyes were to be believed.

‘A very sad day for you, Mr Cooke,’ said the inspector.

Charlie nodded and there was a fresh welling of tears which he scrubbed at roughly. Then he looked up at Hutchinson and frowned.

‘What do you mean “for me”?’ he said.

‘What is there for me to mean?’ Hutchinson shot back.

Then Charlie seemed to realise, rather late, what the inspector was at and he countered it.

‘It’s a sad day for all of us. Me no more and no less than anyone,’ he said.

‘Quite so, exactly,’ the inspector said. ‘Now then.’ He opened a notebook and snapped the band smartly into place, then held up a slim silver propelling pencil and twisted it vigorously until a good half-inch of lead protruded. I wondered if he knew that he looked exactly like a doctor rather too enthusiastically preparing his smallpox vaccine while a toddler trembled before him. I rather thought he did. ‘Start from when you and the other clowns came out of the ring,’ he said, and although Charlie Cooke was a clown and so there was no insult in saying so, still I got the impression that the inspector had prepared the line in advance and greatly relished delivering it.

‘Aye, well,’ said Charlie, struggling to regain composure. ‘Yes, well, off we came, as you say. Tiny and Andrew went to our stall.’

‘Your stall?’ said Hutchinson.

‘Our table and boxes – our props like.’

‘And where exactly is that?’

‘Second one along from the ring doors, flush against the walling. Equestrian director’s table is first, only proper, and then the clowns’, always, on account of all the quick changes and all the multitude of props we have to take on and off. Then it’s the strongman and the others have their stalls wherever they can fit them in.’

‘Wherever they can fit them in,’ the inspector said slowly as he wrote it down. ‘I was going to ask about the layout of your backstage. It’s a gey queer set-up, is it not? Are all circuses that much of a rabbit warren?’

‘That’s Tam’s idea,’ said Charlie Cooke. ‘My brother. Says it calms the animals to have a passageway straight to their stall and not just have them milling.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Hutchinson, with real appreciation in his voice. ‘But tell me,’ he went on, and then stopped. Charlie Cooke was shifting around on his perch on the edge of the box-bed. (It appeared that every living wagon came with exactly two chairs, no more and no fewer, no matter the size of the household, the way that every kitchen I have ever seen has had a single Windsor armchair (and what feuds betwixt cook and housekeeper could be laid to rest if the mistress just delivered one more).)

‘Is something troubling you, Mr Cooke?’ the inspector asked, his voice bland and his eyes round and blinking. Charlie Cooke could hardly answer. What was troubling him was plain to see: he was distressed and exhausted but he had a job to do, a tale to tell, and could not be easy until he had told it, but here was the policeman chit-chatting away about the backstage and thwarting him. My pity flared again and perhaps not mine alone this time, for Hutchinson relented.

‘So you came off,’ he said. ‘Then what?’

‘As I say, Tiny and Andrew went to our stall and I carried on round the passage to the back door to have my smoke, like I usually do.’ Charlie was looking over our heads at the wall behind us as though his words were written there.

‘You didn’t help with the props?’ said the inspector.

‘I leave that to the youngsters,’ said Charlie. ‘On account of how I’m the boss.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Do you know, your sister-in-law said almost the same thing last night. Almost exactly the same words. I should have taken more notice of that.’

Charlie Cooke tensed his jaw a little but carried on.

‘Well, I was there at the back door, as I say, and I heard the pony coming. That’s funny, I thought to myself, for it wasn’t nearly time for anyone else to be off yet. I drew in to the side of the door out of the way, thinking Harlequin would go straight through and then she… she come round the corner and he went over. He just went over and she come off and there she lay, never moved, not a sound out of her. There she lay.’ His voice cracked and he stopped talking.

‘You’re telling me you saw the whole thing?’ Inspector Hutchinson said. Charlie Cooke swallowed hard and brought his eyes down to meet the inspector’s. He nodded.

‘But why-’ I began before I could stop myself.

‘Then what happened?’ said Hutchinson.

Charlie Cooke looked down at the floor as though working to remember.

‘Andrew and Tiny went rushing up to where she was lying. Andrew took off after Harlequin. Tiny made as if to follow but by then Topsy was off and she cried out when she saw what had happened so then Tiny wheeled round and came back, sort of as if to comfort her. Then the Russians come off and Tam’s prads. My God, the time we had! Trying to get they twelve horses past her and not have her trampled. For they were straight to their stalls no stopping them. A brick wall couldn’t have stopped them. What a to-do. And then when the prads were away one of they wee Russian raklies seen Ana and screamed like a train. That’s when you showed up, missus, you’ll be able to tell him all about it from there.’

‘And where was Mrs Cooke all this time?’ said the inspector.

‘I can’t say,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t right know. All the confusion.’

‘Now ask your question, Mrs Gilver,’ said Hutchinson. ‘I’d like to hear the answer too.’

‘Mr Cooke,’ I said, trying to be gentle, to balance the hard note in Hutchinson’s voice, ‘why on earth didn’t you say any of this last night? Right at the start. If what you say is… Well, what I mean is that we really didn’t need to call in the police at all, did we?’

‘I was too shaken up,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t think I could have said a word.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Hutchinson. ‘That’s what your sister-in-law thought it must be. That’s almost exactly how she explained it to me.’

I was trying to remember whether Charlie had indeed spoken while we were all gathered in the tent. I could not say with any certainty. It was Ma who said most, Pa who did the shouting, and to my best recall Tiny and Andrew were the only others who had had a view to share.

‘He was very upset, Inspector,’ I said, remembering the way he had sat with his head in his hands.

‘Can you understand,’ said Charlie, ‘wishing so hard that it wasn’t happening, you could make yourself believe that if you just keep quiet, it wouldn’t be?’

Both the inspector and I were silenced by that. The pain in his voice could not be other than real. When Hutchinson spoke again, his voice was softer.

‘You were particularly close to her then? Miss… Tchah!’ He had clearly not found out Ana’s surname yet and it was troubling him.

Charlie roused himself.

‘No,’ he said, carefully. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘You’ve never seen an accident before, then?’ the inspector went on. ‘Is that it? Lucky, surely? How long have you been a circus man?’

‘Born and bred and ten generations before me,’ said Charlie, stung by the implication. ‘And sure I’ve seen plenty mishaps in my time. When we had the big cats I saw things that would lay you out, I’d wager.’

‘So…?’ said Hutchinson.

Charlie shook his head a few times and began to speak almost to himself. Both the inspector and I keened forward to listen.

‘I’m getting old,’ he said. ‘I was an aerial acrobat, you know. Trapeze, tight rope, slack rope, perch and pole. I used to play a fiddle, standing on a chair on a rope, pretending to be drunk, brought the house down. And now? I can see a young lass heading straight for trouble and I’m too slow to do a thing about it. I just stood there and watched it. It was all over before I knew it had begun. I just stood there. So no, Mr Policeman, you’re right. I wasn’t too upset to talk, I was too ashamed. There. You happy now?’

This, I thought, had the unmistakable ring of truth about it, except that he was speaking of Topsy, not Ana, and of a rope instead of a pony.

Inspector Hutchinson puffed out his cheeks and rolled his eyes when we left Charlie’s wagon a few minutes later, but he did not speak until we were well away from it and could be sure that no one was listening.

‘Not a great liar,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard worse. Could you tell where the join was, Mrs Gilver?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘All the stuff about the liberty horses and the Prebrezhensky girls was true enough – it was so detailed and it tripped off his tongue. But he wasn’t at the back door having his gasper, was he? He didn’t actually see a thing.’

‘No, that was all Ma Cooke’s doing,’ said Hutchinson, ‘and he made one big blunder that clinched it.’ I waited. ‘He said he was by the doors near Ana and when she fell and Andrew and Tiny “went” rushing up to her. See?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s Ana,’ said the inspector, marking the ground with the heel of his boot. ‘And here’s Charlie.’ Another mark. ‘Here’s the other clowns. Now when she fell…’

‘Oh, I see. He should have said they “came” rushing up, shouldn’t he? Very subtle, Inspector.’

‘It’s the kind of thing you should look out for,’ said Hutchinson modestly.

‘Are you sure you want to be encouraging me?’ I asked him, matching his tone if not his mood exactly. ‘Shouldn’t you be rather down on me and my like?’

‘Not me!’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘I’m hoping you’ll keep at it and fill me in as you go. The more the merrier, keep them all on their toes.’

‘And will you return the favour?’ I said. ‘If I’m to be much use, it would help me to know what’s happening.’ I half expected a ticking-off for cheek and a swift end to our collaboration, but the inspector surprised me.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And the first thing I must tell you is what the doctor said. First impression only, you understand, for he will not be doing the post-mortem examination until later on today, but as far as he can gather she really did die from hitting her head on the ground. The injury is quite clear, he says. One blow to the side of her face, bruising from jaw to temple, shattering her cheekbone and fracturing her skull.’

I swallowed and nodded.

‘If she had been bashed on the head and then arranged on the ground, the injury would be quite different. As would the bloodstain. He was as sure as he could be that she hadn’t moved after she started bleeding.’

I could believe it. I remembered from the night before how, until one moved her hair and saw the spreading stain, one could tell oneself she was just resting there.

‘And there is a slight swell on the ground just where she came down,’ said the inspector. ‘Just a bump – you’d never notice it under the grass but it was enough to make the difference.’

‘So she really might just have fallen off her horse?’

‘I doubt it,’ said the inspector. ‘But what I do say is that whoever pushed her or pulled her off or set a trip to throw her off, maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe that was just bad luck.’

‘Can I tell Mrs Cooke you think that?’ I asked him. He considered me for a moment before he answered, looking as weary as ever again.

‘Aye, why not?’ he said. ‘I’ve no time to be bothering with charging her and all that palaver, mind. So I don’t want to see her or Charlie down at the station confessing to false evidence. But if you can get her to stop making my job harder for me, you feel free.’

Not, I thought to myself as he strode away from me, one of those policemen who thrive on dotted ‘i’s and crossed ‘t’s, and I wondered what his Chief Constable would say if he heard the half of it. I had once been landed with the Chief Constable of Perthshire at a Hunt Ball dinner and I knew that there was not an undotted ‘i’ or crossless ‘t’ anywhere about him.