The Winter Ground

10

Mrs Cooke, however, was not to be swayed.

‘Poor Charlie,’ she said, when I waylaid her in her wagon. ‘He saw the whole thing?’

‘Yes, and told the inspector about it in more or less identical words to your own,’ I said. She looked back at me blankly. ‘Inspector Hutchinson is not the kind of man to be fooled,’ I insisted. ‘And anyway, what I’m telling you is that the surgeon thinks she fell off her horse and hit her head on the ground. Do you see? If only you would leave things be and let the police draw their own con clusions, the chances are they would call it an accident. The chances are it was an accident. Oh, don’t you see?’

‘Of course it wurr,’ said Ma. ‘If it wun’t, you think I’d have asked Charlie to-’

‘Aha!’ I said, making her put her hand to her mouth as she had the previous evening but in earnest this time.

‘All right there,’ she said. ‘I got Charlie to say he’d seen it. So run me in. Tell your inspector to get his handcuffs ready.’

‘I shan’t,’ I said, very glad that Inspector Hutchinson had as good as told me not to. ‘But what you’re doing, you and Charlie, is only raising suspicion instead of quelling it.’

‘I’m not one for the police,’ said Ma. ‘Too many’s the times they’ve listened to the flatties calling us thieves and tinkers. Too many’s the times they’ve run us off grounds what we’ve every right to be stopping on. I’m glad they’ve the sense to see it wurr no murder, but I’d still rather have you tell me what happened than them. You’ll puzzle it out for me, won’t you, my beauty?’

‘I shall try,’ I said, feeling far from certain on the point. ‘And you can help me out with some practical details. For instance, we know that Ana left too early and spoiled the spec, but what was supposed to happen? How should it have gone?’

‘Well,’ said Ma. ‘We’ve got two specs. In one, the Russians goes off first, then Topsy, then the liberty prads, clowns next and Ana last, but Pa always said it wurr wrong to have the ring so empty at the end.’ I must have looked sceptical, because she nodded as though agreeing with me. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but he’s always been a proud man and it’s getting worse the less he has to be proud of. Breaks my heart sometimes. Anyways, it wun’t do me no good to stickle over the likes of that so we changed it. And in the new spec Pa’s prads wurr the last to go. Just like last night – except for Bill being in it too. The clowns off first, then Ana, Topsy, the Russians, the prads and Pa at the finish.’

‘Just as they did, in fact?’

‘Only a bit later. It was Ana going off four swings quick what threw Topsy and knocked the timing.’

‘And was it supposed to be bang, bang, bang one after the other?’

‘Never, no,’ said Ma, her enthusiasm for the spectacular growing in her voice as she recounted it. ‘Ana did her best stuff once the clowns went off, most usually, even if she had less time in this spec than the other. The little maids had their finale next and they went off to leave Topsy space for a few lines on the floor – beautiful floor-work she does, seems a shame sometimes she’s always up on a line. If we could get a base man she could work up an adagio before dinnertime. My own ma had an adagio spot – mind you, them days the roughs would cheer to see a lass in tights whether she was any good or no, but my ma was-’ I cleared my throat, and Ma brought herself back to the matter in hand. ‘Then the liberty prads did their last show, all up on their back legs – lovely – and that was that. A good spec, even if I’m saying it myself.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘That was tremendously helpful – thank you.’

‘What is it you’re thinking?’ asked Ma.

I shook my head at her. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up,’ I said. ‘It’s just something the inspector mentioned that I think is worth checking. But I have to be frank with you, Mrs Cooke. If no one did this, if Ana simply fell, I may never find out why. There may not be anything to be found out.’

Ma shook her head, setting her curlpapers bobbing, and retied her dressing-gown cord a little tighter around her middle, as if girding herself for battle with me.

‘She’d no more do such a thing than you would pitch yourself out of that chair right now and smack your face on the rug there,’ she said. ‘Than you would put your hand in the fire reaching out to lift your cuppa, than you would drive yonder little car of yours face first into a brick wall trying to turn a corner.’

‘But if you don’t believe she was killed and you can’t believe it was an accident, what else is there?’ I said. ‘And I must say, since I’ve been here I’ve heard of nothing else but broken legs and lost arms.’

‘You dun’t understand,’ said Ma. ‘How do you think Ana learned to stand on Harlequin’s back? And the arabesques? Handstands? Flick-flacks? How do you suppose she learned it all?’

‘On the mechanic,’ I said, ‘like Inya and Alya?’

‘No, none of that,’ said Ma. ‘Ana’s not proper circus. She’s a josser. She taught herself, from a little maid. And how she learned was by falling off, on to the grass of a paddock, every blessed time until she din’t fall off no more.’

I was still confused but I was intrigued by the glimpse of Ana’s past, the first I had heard so far.

‘What do you know about her?’ I said. ‘About when she was a little… maid, I mean.’

Ma laughed softly but her eyes glistened with sudden tears.

‘Well, she wun’t no Russian princess, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘She wurr a lady, though, no doubt about that much. Beautiful things, she had.’

‘What kind of things?’ I asked. I had only seen Ana in her ring costume and in the same rough practice clothes as all the others.

‘Her nightgowns and her chimmies,’ said Ma. ‘Pure silk like spiders’ webs, they wurr. And a writing case all set with motherof-pearl and pens to match. But there’s more to life than silk and pearls and she had a hard start. You could see it in her eyes even if she never let me read her palm and so I reckon whatever she wanted to forget, she was welcome to forget it and tell her own tale.’

‘It didn’t endear her all round,’ I said. ‘Not everyone has your sympathetic spirit, Ma.’ I flushed, for the name had slipped out unbidden, but she only smiled at me and inclined her head as though acknowledging a compliment, which I suppose it was in its way.

‘I’d have got round them all in the end,’ she said. ‘I told Topsy many’s a time she din’t know how lucky she wurr, big band of Turvys and Cookes all about her all the time, so’s she was born knowing who she wurr and how come. Family’s the thing, see, but try telling that to young ones. Topsy wun’t know what it felt like to be a lost soul and she’d no call to be laughing at Ana for the pain of it. Same as Tiny and Andrew, I used to tell her. Ana din’t fit any better into where she come from than them two. Except as her not fitting was all on the inside. Like that Toberomey’s missus. Her spirit’s dying in her breast, you ask me. She don’t fit where she’s landed, not nearly.’

Now that was very interesting, I thought to myself later. I had simply hinted that someone – no one in particular – might feel rather less than sympathetic in regards to Ana’s nonsense and Topsy’s name had come up without my giving it the slightest nudge. Could it be that Inspector Hutchinson was right after all? And did Ma actually know something or had she simply divined it? I had no high opinion of Madame Polina with her palms and leaves but there was no denying that Polly Cooke had a feeling for people.

First stop the shepherds’ hut, I thought, where Donald and Teddy were looking rather tidier than the previous morning; perhaps Zoya had more interest in brushed hair and scrubbed necks than me, who had been planning rather vaguely to drag them back to Nanny in a day or two and hand them over for sluicing

‘We had cheese sandwiches for breakfast, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘And cocoa.’

I suppressed a shudder.

‘Well, good then,’ I said, trying to sound brisk since I was sure that briskness was the usual sound of their mother and would put them at their ease. ‘Now, tell me, boys. What happened last night at the back of the ring?’

At that, the simple internal comforts of the sandwiches and cocoa seemed to recede a little; both of them looked instantly less rosy, less replete. Teddy visibly shrank into his chair, shook his hair down over his forehead and then looked up at me from under it in that way which was intermittently endearing a few years ago but had long since palled.

‘What do you mean?’ Donald said.

‘Why did Anastasia leave?’ I asked. ‘She wasn’t due to, you know. Did you see anything? Did she say why she was going?’

‘Is she dead?’ said Teddy. ‘Mrs P said she was gone, but we couldn’t be exactly sure what that meant, could we?’

‘She is,’ I said. ‘She fell off. Like Perdita’s uncle. Cousin Bellamy, remember?’ I had clear memories of their re-enacting the grisly end of distant Cousin Bellamy all over the nursery, gardens and especially banisters since he had come off at the top of a steep stretch of scree and had tumbled backwards under the hooves of the following hunters, coming to rest face down in a streambed or, in Donald and Teddy’s version, a heap of coats and dog blankets thrown down at the foot of the stairs.

‘You mean she got squashed by the liberty prads?’ said Donald.

‘No, no, simply that she-’

‘What did she fall down? Did the pony hare off up the path beside the waterfall?’

‘No-’

‘Only we thought she was in the back tent, didn’t we?’

‘Or else what was the scream? We thought that was Inya, didn’t we?’

‘Blimey, Ma, don’t tell me that scream was Anastasia. Did she see someone back there and scream and rush off up the hill and tumble down into the pool? Did she drown?’

‘No-’

‘Only Anya said last night she had hit her head.’

‘Did she hit her head and pass out and then drown?’

‘And get dragged back to the tent by one mangled foot stuck in a stirrup, all wet and dead?’

‘Will you stop it?’ I managed to get out at last. ‘Yes, she is dead. Do you hear me? Anastasia died last night. Will you stop being such…’ I could not finish the thought, since what I was asking, in essence, was that they stop being such boys. ‘All I need to hear from you is what happened when she left the ring.’

‘Nothing,’ said Teddy. ‘Nothing at all. She went cantering round and round and then… why does it matter anyway, Mother?’

Donald kicked him.

‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

‘She just left?’

They nodded.

‘Did she look at all perturbed or anxious?’

This they considered for a moment before answering, but very soon Donald began to shake his head and Teddy joined in.

‘And did it seem to you as though Anastasia was still in charge of her pony?’ I asked. This was something which had only occurred to me in the night: had the placid rosy-back had some kind of fit? He had seemed as calm as could have been reasonably expected when Andrew Merryman brought him back to the tent doors and had accepted Pa Cooke digging him in his heaving ribs really quite stoically, but it was one possible explanation and I had dispatched Alec this morning first to the stable tent to commune with Harlequin himself – Alec has an excellent sense for horses – and then to track down Andrew and quiz him about the pony’s state of mind.

Donald and Teddy glanced at one another again.

‘Hard to say,’ was what Donald plumped for at last. ‘Was it Ana or Harlequin bolting? What did you think, Ted?’

‘It could have been him,’ said Teddy, thoughtfully. ‘That would make most sense, wouldn’t it? If Harlequin had a sort of a brainstorm and he just leapt the ring fence and galloped off through the ring doors into the night. That would make sense of everything.’

‘But it’s a clear case of an improbable possibility,’ I said, more to myself than to them, ‘and so not to be preferred.’

‘Says you,’ said Alec Osborne a little later when we had rendezvoused in my motor car over a flask. ‘You might be impressed by that particular little riddle, Dan, but I’ve always found it to reveal itself as clever tosh if one wheels around suddenly and snaps one’s fingers.’

I unstoppered the flask and poured out a measure of steaming, rum-scented coffee into my silver cup. Mrs Tilling’s tender feelings towards me were never more evident than in her preparation of warming drinks on cold mornings.

‘What did you mean anyway?’ Alec said.

‘Just that while an ordinary pony might be prone to fits of temperament, bucking, bolting and what have you, surely such a pony could never do what Harlequin does every day of the week.’

‘That’s a probable impossibility, though, isn’t it?’ said Alec, squinting with the effort of concentration.

‘Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself?’

‘I’ll have some of that coffee, if you can spare it. The idea that…?’

‘That Harlequin – his years of excellent behaviour in the ring and out of it serving as his character witness – simply could not have had what my sons called “a brainstorm” and bolted, so Ana must have taken off deliberately, and so must have done it for a reason, and so it is worth our trying to find out what that reason was.’

Alec nodded but was prevented from answering immediately since he had just swallowed his first draught. Mrs Tilling’s idea of rum coffee was not a cup of coffee with a splash of rum in it, but a cup of rum with just enough coffee to warm it through.

‘Whewf!’ Alec said, after a couple of gulps. ‘Yes, I agree. I can’t believe that pony has a temperamental bone in his body. I’ve never seen a bigger eye nor a softer lip and I ran my hands right up and down all four legs – and this on first acquaintance and after his upsets yesterday evening – without him so much as flinching.’

‘You sound worse than Ma and her tea leaves,’ I told him.

‘And while he was most certainly frightened last night – plunging around in the dark – I hear he wasn’t the least bit angry and came over for kind words and strokes without even being called.’

‘This from Andrew Merryman?’ I guessed. Alec nodded. ‘And do we trust his judgement? Do we trust his word, come to that?’

‘I do,’ said Alec. ‘Because you’ll never guess what, Dan.’ I waited. ‘Andrew Merryman is the name of a circus clown.’ I waited again. ‘I mean to say, “Andrew Merryman” is a clown’s name. Like “Jack Pudding”.’

‘Who?’

‘Or Charlie. That’s not his real name, you know.’

‘Charlie Cooke?’

‘No, it’s Thomas.’

‘It can’t be. His brother’s name is Thomas.’

‘No, his brother’s name is William. He’s the younger one. He took on the name of Thomas because Tam Cooke is always the ringmaster of Cooke’s Circus. And Charlie is Charlie because he’s a clown.’

‘But he’s only been a clown since he gave up the trapeze,’ I said. ‘And everyone calls him Charlie all the time.’

‘Oh, Dandy, he’s always been a clown. I bet it was he himself who told you about the trapeze, wasn’t it? He used to do some wire work – a little – but he’s always only ever been just the clown. His brother was the boss from the beginning. Their father handed the circus on that way, cut out the older son.’

‘Poor Charlie,’ I said. ‘No wonder he’s so touchy about it all.’

‘But really, when you think about the way Ma clicked her fingers and got him to lie to the inspector about seeing Ana fall, you can see he’s not the commanding type.’

‘How did you know he lied? Where are you getting all of this?’

‘Miles Fanshawe told me,’ said Alec, enjoying the bewildered look on my face. Fanshawe was ringing a faint bell. ‘Remember, Dandy? Fanshawe from school, who growed and growed? It’s him.’ Illumination shone on me at last.

‘Andrew Merryman?’

‘And you have to admit that he was right to go for the change of name, wasn’t he? Tumbling Miles Fanshawe would be too silly for words.’

‘Amazing!’ I said. ‘My goodness, you must have been thunderstruck to see him.’

‘Didn’t recognise him,’ said Alec. ‘Believe it or not he’s filled out since schooldays and Fanshawe would never have had that look of… what would you call it? Quiet confidence? Manly competence? Fanshawe was a bit of a ninny, truth be told.’

I was having trouble reconciling any kind of confidence or competence with the wavering, blushing Andrew Merryman and my doubt must have shown.

‘Ah,’ said Alec, ‘no less hopeless in the presence of girls, eh? He spent one Easter with a pal we shared and hardly came out of his bedroom on account of an overdose of giggling sisters. Still, I think we can safely accept his word and his judgement, don’t you?’

I suppressed a snort of laughter.

‘Certainly not!’ I said. ‘Because he’s an old Harrovian? Because he’s “people like us, darling”? Of course not.’

Alec was staring at me, rather red, and he is always at his most endearingly peculiar-looking when he has turned red. It clashes so dreadfully with his tawny hair and makes his freckles look yellow.

‘Well, I think that’s a bit much,’ he said. ‘Miles – Fanshawe – Merryman,’ he announced this last with an air of finality, ‘Merryman wasn’t on our list of suspects for anything at all yesterday. And we already knew he was “people like us” as you so revoltingly put it – what a snob you are, Dandy – so the only thing we’ve found out really is that yes, he went to my school, and was in my house, and now all of a sudden he’s more suspicious than before? All of a sudden, he’s the one we need to keep our eye on? I just think that’s a bit much.’

I sensed that it was best to move to other matters. ‘And what about Topsy Turvy?’ I said. ‘Has one been insulting her dignity calling her that all this time?’

‘Strange to tell,’ said Alec, ‘Turvy is her family name and she was christened Topsy. One of a long line of Topsies, if you can credit it.’

‘I can. The circus is wrote through her like Blackpool through rock,’ I said. ‘And such sound knowledge of where one belongs is not be sniffed at, Alec dear. Ma is all too convincing on that score.’

‘Well, in any case,’ said Alec, uninterested in my quoting new friends if I would not listen to what he had got from his old ones, ‘whether Harlequin took it upon himself to leap the ring fence or Ana made him leave, it brings us back to the idea of an accident.’

‘Why?’

‘Because how could anyone know that she was going to be backstage when she shouldn’t have been?’

‘But darling, that’s the thing,’ I said. ‘She should have been. She was a tiny little bit early but she was just about to go off anyway and everyone in the circus knew it. Come with me.’ I stepped down from the motor car and made my way to the back door of the tent.

‘I’m not sure I see the import of that,’ Alec said, following me.

‘It was the inspector’s idea – one of the many, just mentioned in passing. A booby trap. A trip wire.’

‘When could it have been done?’ Alec asked. ‘It would have to be after the animals came in or they’d have broken it going the other way.’

‘But they came in first. There would have been heaps of time for anyone to stretch a rope across the passageway afterwards. And I just wondered… wouldn’t it leave a trace, a mark of some kind?’We had arrived. I could not help a shiver as I looked around, for that drab little corner was so familiar to me after the long wait for the police with Ma that I was sure I should never forget an inch of the canvas, a plank of its gangway or a single blade of the trodden, deadening grass.

‘This is the spot here, isn’t it?’ said Alec, nudging with his toe a place where the grass had been killed, scoured away, by – one guessed – a scrubbing brush and some fearsome caustic solution.

‘So if that’s where she fell,’ I said, ‘where would she have come off? Where would Harlequin have had to stumble for Ana to end up there? Would she fall forward, Alec, or backwards? How far?’

‘Forward,’ he said. ‘Just like a refusal.’

‘Of course.’ My first ever experience of carrying on without a pony who had decided to stop was over thirty years ago now, but I still remembered the sudden weightlessness, the seemingly endless flight over the spurned hedge and the sharp drop into the nettles beyond. ‘So let’s say between here and there,’ I said, pointing. Alec did a couple of knee-bends as though warming up for a PT display and then crouched down at one side of the passageway. I turned my attention to the other.

‘If we do find something,’ I said, presently, ‘let’s say a pair of stout nails with shreds of rope still clinging to them, we mustn’t touch anything. We must hand it straight over to the police.’

‘Who have probably already checked,’ said Alec. ‘And wouldn’t whoever put the rope across have made sure to come back and remove the nails afterwards?’

I sat back on my heels and looked over at him.

‘Would you? If you had got away with it, would you risk being seen tidying things away?’

‘Excellent point, Dan,’ said Alec and bent his head again.

The canvas walling of the tent was tacked every five feet or so to a thick post and while these posts bore all the marks of a long hard life, the only nails I could find were ancient, rusted and hammered in hard to the wood out of harm’s way.

‘I don’t think much of the tent men,’ said Alec. ‘Leaving so many good nails behind them instead of prying them out and keeping them in a jar for next time.’

I had never been convinced of the moral necessity to gather jars of old nails about one, even if one did not have to cart them around the country between standings, so I said nothing.

When we had worked our way back farther than remotely plausible, I stood up at last. There had not been a single new bruise showing white on the dirty wood, not a single new nail hole and not even any suspiciously soiled patches where someone might have ground in mud to hide them. I looked up, wondering if anything could have been rigged from above. Alec’s eyes followed mine. The roof of the tent was dizzyingly high and my shoulders and spirits slumped at the thought of clambering up somehow and inching around up there, fruitlessly searching.

‘It would have been nice to find something,’ said Alec, ‘but the absence of physical clues doesn’t prove that you’re wrong. You’ve always scoffed at the idea of them before.’

‘I’ve scoffed at inch-square swatches of unusual tweed smelling of unusual tobacco,’ I said, ‘but I think if there had been a trap rigged here we would have found something.’

‘Not if the cord or whatever was tied to a stake that was banged in and then pulled out again.’ Alec looked about as enthusiastic as I felt about the idea of crawling around the grass looking for holes or plugs of mud where holes had been and gone. ‘I’ll ask the tent men if they saw anything odd. It’ll give me an excuse to get talking to them – most welcome. What a great pity Donald and Teddy couldn’t be more firm about what they saw. But they hadn’t been briefed, had they?’

‘Alec, please,’ I said. ‘Of course they hadn’t been briefed. They are only here to lend my presence a respectable justification in the eyes of Hugh and the world at large. I’m hardly going to draft them on to my staff like…’

‘Special constables?’

‘Quite.’

‘Has Inspector Hutchinson grilled them yet? Lord – grilled? Skinned, filleted, diced and fried: I felt five years old last night when he started in on us, didn’t you?’

‘They are certainly in his sights,’ I said. ‘He’s already made short work of Charlie.’

‘And who’s next on your list?’ Alec asked.

‘I’m going to tackle Ina,’ I said, ‘which is a job best done by me alone, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘Tackle her about what?’

‘She wasn’t in her seat last night when Inya screamed, when you and I raced across the ring. I need to know where she had got to.’

Alec whistled and raised his eyebrows.

‘Ina Wilson?’ he said.

‘Well, no, not really, not for any reason that I can imagine. Apart from anything else she couldn’t possibly have known when Ana was going to leave the ring. But I need to check, don’t you agree?’

We parted company at that, Alec leaving by the back doors for the stable tent and I making my way to the front doors to begin my walk to the castle. It was rather a splendid winter’s day, half past eleven the very peak of it. The worst of the overnight chill was gone and the low sun was doing its best, dazzling through the tree branches and melting a little of the frost off the grass here and there. In another two hours it would give up the fight again, of course, and the cold would creep back across the lawns from where the shadows had hoarded it all day, but now was the moment to be out in it if one had to be out at all.

The sweet butler looked troubled when he answered the door and I suppose the very fact that he was on duty there instead of one of the maids, like a bear in the mouth of his cave ready to repel all invaders, was more evidence of the mood in the house.

‘How is Mrs Wilson this morning?’ I said as I followed him up the short half flight of marble steps to the level of the great hall.

‘She’s fine, thank you, madam,’ he said with just a touch of emphasis on the first word.

In the hall, Ina did indeed look fine, the chalky pallor of the previous evening quite driven away and replaced not by the flush which might be expected (for the hall was still rather stuffy from the evening before and both fires were once again burning high up into the chimneys) but by rosy cheeks and clear, sparkling eyes, and to see such a marked change, given my current mission, made me rather uneasy. If one comes delicately to enquire where a friend was when death was being dealt, one does not welcome the sight of that friend transformed. I told myself sternly that the transformation – if indeed one should call it that and might it not be less fancifully described as a good mood? – could easily arise from a certainty that the travesty of the circus party would have seen off Robin Laurie from their door for ever, or could even be owing to the nasty events of the evening before making Ina, not to mention Albert, forget about her years-old and let us face it rather distant brush with death and just think about something else for a change.

Albert was certainly distracted, I could be sure. He was pacing up and down in front of the nearer of the two fireplaces, with his hands laced together behind him under his coat flaps, staring at the rug as he crossed it. Ina sat at the piano against the far wall. There was a great jumbled heap of sheet music on top of it and spilling on to the floor as though she had spent hours searching for just the right piece to suit the occasion. Since what she was still fingering away at in a desultory fashion was a Strauss polka, however, one could only conclude that she had given up.

‘Ah, Mrs Gilver,’ said Albert. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ He had clearly suffered a great downturn in his view of himself since yesterday and there was to be no more ‘Dear Dandy’. On the other hand, he was too preoccupied to simper and the result, overall, was the most sensible speech I had ever heard fall from his lips. True, it was nothing of any import and could have been replaced by a smile and a wave but it was a refreshing change not to be tired of him already. ‘Have you come from the winter ground?’ he went on. ‘We have just had a visit from that dreadful man, Sergeant McClennan, and he said the circus folk are being questioned.’

Ina stopped playing and looked up.

‘You didn’t tell me that, Albert,’ she said. ‘Sergeant McClennan didn’t mention it either.’

‘You didn’t speak to the sergeant together?’ I asked, thinking it a very bad thing for the Wilsons if McClennan had deliberately separated them to go through his questions. That fate had befallen Alec and me once, in the past, and nothing I could imagine was more designed to make one feel shifty. Of course, when Alec and I had spent our uncomfortable spells in separate back rooms of an Edinburgh police station we had rather better reasons for feeling shifty than the policemen’s caution. I hoped that the same was not true of the Wilsons today.

‘If I had had my way my dear wife would not have had to speak to the man at all,’ said Wilson. ‘But he insisted she join us and give her impressions. I congratulate myself on keeping her away from the worst of it, though. Yes, I congratulate myself heartily on that.’ Then came the customary pause, presumably so that I could congratulate him too. Albert Wilson’s short leave from duty as an oddity was over.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Ina, ‘no one could say you haven’t taken excellent care of me throughout the whole sorry episode and since Mrs Gilver is here now – if you’ll stay and have some coffee with me, Dandy? – I think you would be more than justified if you returned to your own concerns.’

‘I have nothing pressing on me, my love,’ said Albert.

‘And would not tell me if you did,’ said Ina, bestowing a sweet smile on him.

‘That I should not.’

‘So, you see, I cannot help but worry that you are neglecting it all,’ Ina said, and she knitted her brow and pouted like a child in a soapflakes advertisement. It was sickening to see. ‘And then I worry that when it does catch up with you, you will be so busy that you’ll tire yourself and become ill and then I shall have to do without you more than I could bear or can bear even to imagine.’

Albert Wilson, as might be expected unless one knew in advance that he was a very unusual type of man, lapped all of this up and then trotted out of the room like a well-schooled pony. Ina and I listened to his footsteps crossing the dining room and then pattering away up a distant flight of stone steps – Benachally is one of those fearfully inconvenient houses with a spiral staircase at every corner and every bedroom leading out of another one. Eventually the sound reached us of a far-off door slamming shut and we both sat back, I against the plump velvet cushion at my back – and it always amazes me how the Wilsons’ cushions are never damp or musty despite that barn of a hall – and Ina against the open piano, her elbows crashing a jagged chord out of the keys.

‘Have you come from the circus now?’ she asked me. ‘This minute? Have you seen them this morning? How are they all?’

I nodded. This was heartening: if she had quizzed me on what the police were up to and what the gossip was, I should have worried even more than I was worrying, but a sweet concern for how her circus friends were bearing up under their misfortune was a relief to behold.

‘I’ve seen Ma Cooke and Charlie,’ I told her.

‘No one else?’

‘Alec managed a quick word with… one of the clowns.’ I was not about to get embroiled in Miles Fanshawe’s rebirth as Merryman. ‘And he went to visit Harlequin too. There at least the news is all good – calm as a millpond and full of breakfast, apparently.’

‘And what are the police making of it?’ Ina asked. ‘Sergeant McClennan wouldn’t tell us a thing, no matter what Albert says about having to shield me.’

‘Inspector Hutchinson is making plenty of it,’ I said and she sat forward, jangling the piano keys again. ‘That grey hair and grey face are a brilliant disguise. He’s actually a remarkable man, rather terrifyingly so, spouting new suspects and new theories like mushrooms – one shrinks from mentioning a name to him.’

‘But whose name have you mentioned?’ said Ina, looking alarmed. ‘Dandy, what have you done?’

‘Oh well, Topsy’s – inadvertently – and my sons are in for a roasting too, I rather think.’ I was looking around the room as I spoke, very airy, but I did manage to see Ina sit back, just a little.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s all right then. I mean, Topsy and your two were in the ring when it happened, weren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and speaking of who was where…’

‘If only it had happened earlier,’ said Ina, speaking over me. ‘While everyone was still in the ring, then there would be no suspicion at all and the police wouldn’t even be here. It’s so horrid to know that they’re all being pestered by that nasty sergeant and if Inspector Hutchinson really is as fanciful as you say then goodness knows what he’ll come up with and how they’ll suffer.’

I felt myself forming the words to ask her who would suffer more than Anastasia had, but they sounded waspish even in the planning and I felt sure that waspishness was not the best tone to adopt since I had questions needing answers.

‘Hmm,’ I contented myself with saying and when I continued I tried very hard to speak gently. ‘Anyway, Ma and the Wolfs were back there throughout, so there would always have been someone under suspicion. And besides, nasty as it is – and I quite agree about the sergeant, what a terror – one can hardly let it pass unchallenged. Ana died, my dear Ina, a young girl died.’

‘Don’t,’ said Ina, her eyes filling. ‘It was a horrid accident. Let’s not think about it. Don’t make me.’

‘How can you be so sure it was?’ I asked. ‘Did you see something?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, stopping with her handkerchief up to her eyes and staring past it at me. ‘I saw what you saw. Less, even. I thank the Lord I did not see what happened… behind… afterwards. I couldn’t bear to see the things you have to look at, Dandy. I do think you’re wonderful for being able to face it.’

I felt myself rise up from in my middle and sit six inches straighter in my seat, as though Nanny Palmer had just – as once she used to, twenty years ago – put her knee in the small of my back and pulled hard on my stays. It might work on Albert Wilson, I thought, but it would never work on me.

‘I am glad, for your sake, that you didn’t go around and see anything horrid,’ I said. ‘Where did you go?’

Now Ina rose and straightened.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

‘When you left your seat,’ I reminded her. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Oh, you mean earlier!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes, I did slip out a little earlier, just for a moment.’

‘Well, I don’t like to argue with you, my dear,’ I said, not meaning a word of it, ‘but you weren’t back when Inya screamed, were you? You might have left earlier, but it can’t have been for a moment, because you weren’t there. When she screamed.’

‘Dandy!’ said Ina, laughing and shaking her head. ‘Can you really be saying this? Can you seriously be saying these things to me?’ She was an excellent actress, having had to learn the skill to survive her marriage and not run mad, but it was only acting.

‘Of course not, you goose,’ I cooed back, no mean actress myself and trained at the same school, ‘what an idea! But I just wanted to know if you saw anything or anyone – anything out of place or anyone creeping around… or anything really. Where were you? Where did you go?’

‘It’s going to sound so silly,’ Ina said, dipping her head and looking up at me shyly, ‘but I went out and came back in, that’s all. Went outside and stood in the dark, looking at the stars, and then came back in again.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, that will sound even sillier.’ I noticed, however, that she did not redden as she spoke.

‘Please don’t worry about looking silly in front of me,’ I assured her. ‘I look silly at least once every time I leave the house.’

‘Well, those awful people had ruined it for me, rather,’ she said. ‘Robin Laurie and the rest of them, and then Albert was fussing as usual and I thought if I went outside into the dark and then stole back in on tiptoe, I should be able to feel the magic of it – properly – the way I was so looking forward to. See? Silly.’

Indisputably, I thought, and all the more plausible for it, but not actually true.

‘I looked around and couldn’t see you,’ I said. ‘And then when Inya screamed, Alec Osborne and I rushed across the ring and went out through the curtains – the ring doors – to the backstage. Halfway across, I turned around and called to everyone to stay put. You would know I did, my dear, if you had been there, which you weren’t, as I know, because I didn’t see you.’

I was rather proud of this, but it cut no ice at all with Ina.

‘I know what you did and what you said,’ she told me. ‘You shouted “Keep to your seats” and I remember thinking what a very forthright way it was of speaking. I wondered if it came from the army or something.’

I could not bring to mind exactly what I said the previous evening. ‘Keep to your seats’ did not strike me as something too alien ever to have fallen from my lips although I agreed with Ina that it was brusque and none too feminine an expression. Had she accused me of saying ‘Don’t move or else’ I should have known she was lying, but this was either a lucky guess or it was true.

‘But I couldn’t see you,’ I said.

‘I told you,’ said Ina, ‘I could never do what you do. I thought I was going to faint, even without seeing a thing, even without knowing what was there to be seen. I felt my eyes begin to roll up and so I…’ I knew what she was going to say before she said it. ‘… I put my head down, in between my knees.’ She did it again, there on the piano stool, folding herself flat and letting her arms brush against the tops of her shoes. Rather spry for an invalid, I thought.

‘Ah well, that explains it,’ I said, once she had sat up again. ‘I do apologise. But I really was only trying to pump you for clues about the others, you know. I didn’t imagine that you harboured murderous thoughts of Ana.’

‘Well, you were pretty fierce then,’ said Ina. ‘I’d hate to see you when you were suspicious. You could give Sergeant McClennan a run for his money, any day.’

I laughed along with her, feeling sheepish.

‘It would have been a foolish story to tell anyway,’ I said. ‘Robin Laurie was right there – you were in plain sight of him – and I don’t think he’d have been overcome by chivalry, do you?’

Ina Wilson’s smile left her face at that. It would not be true to say that it faded or even that it died upon her lips; it went like a lizard’s tongue, or a bullfrog’s wattle – snap!

‘Why do you loathe him so?’ I asked her. ‘He’s a bit of a blister, I grant you, and I don’t imagine that his suddenly chumming up with your husband springs from any well of brotherly friendship, but he’s… Oh, how does one put it? He’s not a serious individual, do you see? Like a little boy, really, and – like a little boy – the best thing to do is to ignore him, no matter how much one’s hand itches to give him a sound spanking.’

‘I agree,’ said Ina. ‘I’d rather never think about him.’ She spoke so vehemently that I blinked.

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘I had no idea that you really knew him.’

‘We shared a nurse,’ said Ina, startling me. I had shared a nurse, in a way, as a tiny child. That is to say, one had been poached from a neighbour, enticed into my parents’ house and up the nursery staircase with promises of undreamed-of freedom – bottles of stout after lights out every evening and my mother encouraging all the maids to throw away their corsets and take up cycling. The trouble was that Henry Elder, the smallest son of the neighbour, had been inconsolable with grief at the loss of this nurse – she was a darling – and had practically moved in with us for a whole summer until he was sent away to school.

‘You shared a nurse?’ I echoed, trying to imagine how the nursery wing of the seat of the Marquis of Buckie could have shared its staff with the West End flat of a minor Glasgow don.

‘A hospital nurse,’ said Ina, ‘when I was ill. He spoke of it the other week, don’t you remember? At least, he alluded to it. My nurse came to us from Buckie, came back to town after nursing the Laurie children and their mother.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Oh, I see! And Robin knew that? He blames this nurse leaving for… Oh, and Albert doesn’t know, does he? Gosh, what a tangle. How very uncomfortable for you.’

‘Yes,’ said Ina. ‘It is. It’s horrid.’

‘Only,’ I said, my thoughts catching up with me at last, ‘doesn’t that episode reflect rather better on him than almost anything else one has ever heard? Why exactly would this shared nurse make you revile him? I mean, if he was incensed by the nurse leaving his poor brother’s family in the lurch, then he can’t be as mercenary as all that. At least he didn’t throw up his hands and shout hurrah at the thought that they might succumb from lack of expert care. Because one of the worst things I ever heard about the man – and there is plenty to choose from – is that he stood idly by rubbing his hands and counting his gold while they all went down. That would have been shocking.’

Ina was shaking her head.

‘Susan Currie is an excellent nurse,’ she said, ‘but discretion is not her strong suit, at least it wasn’t then. She should never have come prattling to me about her last case. She shouldn’t have burdened me with it. It wasn’t fair.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But did she actually tell you anything about Robin himself – anything that’s worse than we all know?’

But Ina only shook her head again; clearly, while Nurse Currie might be a bristling switchboard of sickroom gossip she – Ina Wilson – was a dead line.