The Winter Ground

11

Back at the ground, it might only have been my fancy but there seemed to be an atmosphere hanging over the place as palpable as a low fog, at least as far as the adults were concerned: no one in her doorway; no one mending his props by the big fire; all the wagons closed tight against the roaming inquisitors in a way they were never closed against simple cold. The children on the other hand had bounced back like rubber balls let go at the bottom of a pond. Tommy Wolf and Little Sal were juggling what I shuddered to notice were glass beer bottles to one another, with Bunty wheeling between them, but not wheeling in her usual fashion, whining with excitement and snapping her teeth; wheeling in perfect figures of eight with her nose and tail high, and snootily ignoring the flashing bottles above her. The Prebrezhensky girls were there too, wrapped up in their thick jerkins and leggings and looking infinitely snugger than the others (I supposed they were prepared for Russian winters and so did not have to make do with an extra jersey and two pairs of mittens during a cold snap in Perthshire), and had taken on a far greater task than the training into submission of my beloved Dalmatian: amid great gales and shrieks, they were teaching my sons to cartwheel.

I drew back into the shade of the trees to watch them for a while. Of course, Donald and Teddy had precisely five days of circus under their belts compared with the others’ years, but I fancied I could discern something slightly more foursquare about them as they smacked their leather-gloved hands together and launched themselves at the frozen ground. In the execution, though, they looked pitiful and it was a lesson to me to compare their helpless flailing legs and clumsy landings with the appearance of helpless flailing that Andrew Merryman put on. I could see, all of a sudden, that the cringing and buckling he had shown to me might have been the act, the skill and precision he used to produce it being the real Andrew, the real Miles, the man himself.

‘I wouldn’t tip them, would you?’ said Alec’s voice at my shoulder, making me jump.

‘What?’

‘If I saw them on a street corner. I’d keep my change in my pocket.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Pity opens more purses than pride.’

‘Dear God, Dandy.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I can’t seem to get Nanny Palmer out of my head this morning, and she was right. I can sweep past any number of fiddlers dancing a jig on street corners but there’s an old soldier with no legs and a black spaniel who sits at the Waverley steps and I simply pour my wallet into his cup every time I see him.’

‘Him!’ said Alec. ‘Yes, me too. I’ve started going up the other way out of the station to avoid him.’

‘How were the tent men?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, all together before the show started and for its short duration,’ said Alec. ‘So either they’re lying for one another or they’re out of the running. And they were in the strawed tent – the animal tent at the back doors. They didn’t see a thing.’

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘I can understand the grooms being there, but why the tent men? Shouldn’t they have been in the tent?’

Alec gave me a little smile, one which I have come to know as the accompaniment to his beckoning me after him along the path of greater knowledge where he precedes me. I loathe those little smiles.

‘It’s an obvious mistake,’ he said, ‘to imagine that a tent man is a kind of stage manager and will be hanging around to help with the running of the show. In fact, they have very little to do with that side of things. They are more like handymen. They erect the tent and set the larger props, that’s all. For instance, they attached Topsy’s rope as soon as Cooke’s arrived here.’

‘And there’s no chance that the rope met with a mishap and they helped themselves from the clowns’ props?’

‘None,’ Alec said. ‘That would be far too lackadaisical. What you don’t seem to appreciate, Dandy,’ and there was that smile again, ‘is how expensive rope is. How closely guarded and well maintained.’

‘How about motives then?’ I said. ‘Any rumblings of unrequited love for Ana or Topsy, as you suggested? You seemed pretty sure on absolutely no evidence.’

‘There’s no need to be quite so scathing,’ Alec replied, which I took to be a no. ‘How did you get on with Ina? Doing anything there?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. I had been musing on Ina’s story all the way back from the castle and I was far from certain what I thought of it. ‘She had an answer for everything I threw at her, but the timing didn’t seem quite right. I tell you what would help – let’s go into the ring and walk it through.’

We were in the performing tent before I had finished explaining it, and Alec was nodding.

‘Sounds rather fishy,’ he said. ‘You looked around before the scream and couldn’t see her.’

‘And she can’t have had her head down then because it was supposedly the scream that made her feel woozy.’

‘But she’d hardly have slipped out to stoke up on all the moonlight and magic after things had started to go awry. Very well, you sit and I look, or I sit and you look?’

‘Well, it was me looking before, but then you’re rather bulkier than Ina. Let’s try both.’

I could certainly see Alec bent double in Ina Wilson’s seat, even when I ran much faster over the ring than I had before; the sawdust had been swept away this morning and there was no chance of slipping if one put on a good pace. So, we swapped roles and that was how Inspector Hutchinson and Pa Cooke came upon us – me going up and down like a jack-in-the-box and Alec lolloping backwards across the ring, shouting that I stuck out like a sore thumb and a blind man could have seen me.

‘What’s this, what’s this?’ said the inspector. I took a deep breath, sent a silent apology to Ina Wilson, for whatever she was up to I was sure it was not knocking Anastasia off her pony, and told him. Pa Cooke looked as delighted as might be expected to have someone who was nothing to do with Cooke’s suddenly dragged on to audition for first murderer, but to my surprise, the inspector shook his head.

‘I’m going to forgive you for not telling me, madam,’ he said, ‘and here’s why. You weren’t looking for her last night, were you? You were just looking around.’

‘Yes, but I very clearly remember not seeing her,’ I insisted. ‘As evidenced by my going to her today to ask where she was.’

‘I always said she was a funny one,’ said Pa. ‘Very keen on hanging around us, she was, Mr Hutchinson. Right from day one.’

The inspector waved him into silence.

‘Yes, but looking and not seeing someone bent down and practically out of sight is completely different from looking to see if you can spot someone you know is bent down out of sight, and seeing a bent-over figure who’s the only buddy in the place is quite different from noticing someone all crouched over when there are forty other people to be looking at. The difference, my dear Mrs Gilver, between “can you see this, that or the other” and a plain “what can you see” is not a small one.’

Alec looked ready to argue, but Inspector Hutchinson put his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and began to pace up and down as though he were a professor on a podium settling into a long lecture. I hoped not.

‘Similarly,’ he began, which was a heart-sinkingly professorial opening, ‘when I spoke to your sons just now’ – I felt a slight flush creep over my cheeks, for I had had good intentions of being there when Teddy and Donald were ground through the inspector’s mill and I had quite forgotten – ‘I was very careful not to ask if they saw such and such or did such and such, but merely asked them what happened last night, what they could tell me.’

‘And what did they tell you?’ I said.

‘That something happened to the pony,’ said the inspector. Alec, Pa Cooke and I all shared one ricocheting look amongst us, which I was almost sure the inspector missed. ‘They’re very bright young lads, Mrs Gilver. You must be proud of them.’ I nodded and managed to hoist a smile to my lips, briefly. I was sure that what the inspector described so diplomatically as Donald and Teddy’s ‘brightness’ was the same facet of their personalities which made me want, sometimes, to roll them up in a thick carpet and lie on top of it. ‘They said exactly what they thought I wanted to hear, assuming that I wanted to hear what you did. And you too, sir.’ He gave first me and then Pa Cooke one of his most paint-stripping stares. Then he turned to the doorway. ‘Boys!’ he shouted, and Donald and Teddy appeared, still slightly red in the face from their cartwheels and still in the leather gloves which made them look like dockers.

‘Now, lads,’ said the inspector. ‘Tell me again what you told me earlier on.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Donald in a voice clear but rather high. ‘We were watching the show, as we said. We couldn’t see the acrobats and the light was a bit dazzling to see much of Miss Turvy, but the liberty horses were absolutely thrilling and even though Anastasia did all her best stuff at the front of the ring, it was still jolly exciting every time she came whipping round past us.’

‘And then,’ said Teddy, taking over very smoothly, ‘this one time, round she came and the pony’s ears were flat back and his eyes were rolling and he was showing all his teeth – trying to get behind the bit, you know – and with Ana clinging on to his – would you call it a bridle, Mr Cooke? That fancy thing Harlequin wears? – well, anyway, with Ana clinging on for dear life he just kind of scissored over the ring fence and shot away out of sight.’

Pa Cooke was by now staring at the boys out of narrowed eyes and one could almost hear the cogs turning. Cogs were turning in me too but I am sure my eyes were as round as eggs, my mouth hanging open. I could not help shaking my head a little: this was nothing like the version they had given me.

‘Now, sir,’ said Hutchinson, putting out an arm towards Pa Cooke as though ushering him to centre stage to start an aria. ‘What exactly did you say to this pair? Hmm? Can you remember how you put it?’

‘Say to them?’ said Pa Cooke. ‘When? What are you getting at, man?’

‘On the way out of the ring last night, of course,’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘I’d like confirmation of what it was you said, and the more accurate the better.’

‘Confirmation,’ Alec murmured at my side. ‘Oh, very clever.’

And indeed the hint that the inspector knew everything already and that denials would be useless and make Pa look a fool did the trick rather neatly.

‘I asked them if they’d lifted the box,’ he said.

‘I know you did,’ said the inspector. ‘Little Sallie heard you. She’s a delightful unspoiled little lass, isn’t she? And what about you, Mother dear? Can you bring to mind what you said to your lads in preparation for them speaking to me?’

‘Now, come, please, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Yes, I spoke to them but I will not agree to “preparation”.’

‘My apologies,’ said Hutchinson. ‘I’m afraid in my line of work I do get in the habit of talking very plainly and I forget what’s expected in polite company sometimes.’ This, of course, was no apology at all but I settled for it.

‘I asked them whether they thought Anastasia had decided to leave the ring or whether her pony had run off with her,’ I said, which was true, to the best of my memory.

‘And they told you what they’ve just told all of us here now?’ said the inspector. ‘Ears back, eyes rolling, bit between the teeth.’ One knew he was talking about the pony but one had to marvel.

‘More or less,’ I said, but then something got the better of me. I like to think it was sheer selfless integrity and honour. ‘Less,’ I said. ‘Much, much less. They did think, on reflection, that Harlequin was the one who decided to leave, not Ana, but there was none of the…’

‘Incidental colour,’ finished the inspector. ‘I thought as much.’

Donald and Teddy did not quite seem to be following all of this, but they understood enough to know they were in trouble and they each pulled their trick of choice. Teddy looked younger in that way he still can; a remarkably effective talent which stays Hugh’s hand and Nanny’s tongue. Donald, years past such ploys, put all his efforts into such a look of cow-eyed innocence that he took on the appearance of a halfwit.

‘Now, listen to me and listen well,’ Inspector Hutchinson said to them, ‘I’m going to forget everything you’ve told me and we’ll start on a fresh page. Agreed?’

The boys nodded, looks of youth and innocence going strong.

‘Very good. Did the pony run off with that poor girl last night or not?’ said the inspector, breaking his own rule of how to ask questions.

‘Yes,’ said my sons, in unison.

‘Just as well for you,’ thundered Hutchinson; the fresh sheet had clearly been a ploy.

Before he could continue, although he looked as though he would have had plenty more to say to fill a silence if he had to, we were all distracted by the sound of a motor car approaching and drawing up outside.

‘Reinforcements, Inspector?’ Alec said, but it sounded to me like a far more expensive engine than that of the policemen’s Belsize, sounded rather horribly familiar in fact. I excused myself to the others and made my way to the door.

Hugh was standing with one foot still inside the Rolls, but with his arms crossed, which made him look rather insecurely balanced, like one of those rugby football players posing with a ball, except that they are usually flanked by supporting team mates and so less likely to topple.

‘Hugh!’ I said. ‘What brings-’

‘Is it true?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, Hugh, is what true?’ I answered, but a sickly feeling was beginning to grow in me, starting in the middle and spreading rapidly outwards.

‘Was someone really murdered here last night?’

‘The police are tending towards an acci-’ I bit my lip. ‘I mean, yes. Possibly. At least, she did die.’

‘And the boys?’ said Hugh, his voice cold enough to freeze the rum coffee in the flask in my pocket at ten paces.

‘Are quite well,’ I replied. ‘They’ve been jolly helpful, actually. They saw something useful and have told the inspector all about it.’

‘They saw it?’ It might have been my imagination but I thought he swayed slightly.

‘No, of course not! Honestly, Hugh. The girl died in the backstage area and the boys were in the ring.’ Too late, I remembered that I had not, in the end, told him this. ‘… side seats, watching the show,’ I added, and it would have been unconvincing even if I had been able to meet his eye while I said it.

‘I cannot believe it of you,’ Hugh said, shaking his head slowly. ‘That you would come home alone and leave them here in this den of-’

‘Den of nothing,’ I said, hotly. ‘Den of perfectly charming people who happen not to be lairds of estates but clowns and acrobats instead.’

‘Den of tricksters and sharpers,’ continued Hugh, ‘and at least one out and out rogue, one murderer, Dandy, for God’s sake, and you left them absolutely unprotected in a flimsy little shepherds’ hut.’

‘It was robust enough when you suggested it,’ I reminded him. ‘And they weren’t unprotected – they had Bunty – and besides, they weren’t in the shepherds’ hut last night anyway. They were with the Prebrezhenskys.’

‘The who?’ squeaked Hugh. I felt I had landed what I believe is known in sporting circles as a knock-out punch and I sailed on.

‘Zoya and Kolya Prebrezhensky. The Russian foot-jugglers. They were well looked after and breakfasted off… Oh God.’ I may even have take a step backwards.

‘Russians?’ said Hugh. He uncrossed his arms at last and gripped the top of the motor-car door for support. ‘Russians?’

‘I’ll just fetch the boys,’ I said. ‘And you can run them home.’

Surprisingly to me, they were only too willing to comply, almost eager to be gone actually. Perhaps the gravity of what had passed here had finally struck them, nailed home by the inspector.

I tried to encourage Bunty into the motor car after them, meaning it as a gesture of affection and generosity. Hugh, of course, took it as an impudent assumption that I could offload my dog on him without even asking and shot me a glare.

‘I’ll follow on as soon as I can,’ I said as the boys were shutting themselves in.

‘No rush,’ said Hugh.

‘Now look,’ I began, for out and out rudeness in the boys’ hearing was stepping beyond our unwritten rule. Hugh slammed the door shut and walked around to stand beside me. I stretched up and pecked him on the cheek – for the benefit of the many eyes I felt sure were watching from behind lace curtains – and he managed not to recoil although his face darkened. ‘Look,’ I repeated, ‘I can see where your feelings have sprung from.’ Hugh dislikes accusations of emotion almost as much as he dislikes implications that he is an open book to me, and I knew it. ‘I admit, I did feel a twinge of something much the same.’ Shared feelings now; he would not stand for much of this. ‘But the very fact I could forget the boys last night means that deep down I knew they were fine. If I hadn’t known the circus folk were all good eggs, bricks and fine fellows, I daresay I should have been as rattled as you.’

There were so very many sources of offence in this short speech that Hugh was still working his mouth silently, trying to choose an opener, when Inspector Hutchinson drew up beside us.

‘That you off, sir?’ he said, affably. ‘Fair enough, I know where they are if I need them. And I’ll try not to keep your good lady from you any longer than I have to. I’m just grateful you’re not whisking her home right now. Thank you.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ said Hugh, and his meaning was clear.

‘Ah well,’ said the inspector, as we stood watching the Rolls pull away. ‘Understandable, eh? It must have sounded bad repeated at third hand from the back of the butcher’s van or whatever.’

‘I wonder how he did hear?’ I said, this thought occurring to me for the first time.

‘Well, however it was, you can be sure it got embellished in the telling. She’ll have had a dagger through her heart by teatime. And I’ll not get my quiet pint of stout tonight.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You can be sure every roofer and carter in the Royal will have a better idea than me of what’s happened and they won’t stand for “an accident”, by Jove they won’t. See, if it was the superintendent who had to listen to all the experts in the public bar he’d not be so quick to haul me back to the station and get me on to the next thing, would he? But he’s a teetotaller, and you just don’t get the same dedication to gossip in a church choir. And he’s not married either, so he won’t be hearing about it when he gets home.’

‘Has your superintendent hauled you?’ I said. ‘When? Has he telephoned to the castle?’

‘Not him,’ said Hutchinson. ‘He’d never pester the big house. But I can feel it coming like thunder.’

‘How could he?’

‘Surgeon’s report,’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘That and the fact that it’s circus folk, I’m sorry to say. Different if it was locals, respectable types, with their birth and marriage lines and all their school reports tied up in a bow. We can’t even get a name for this poor girl.’

‘Really? Nothing amongst her things?’

‘Not a sausage. Not so much as a letter from an old chum to be found and it’s bothering my super’s tidy mind. He’ll be glad to close the door on the whole thing.’

‘Do you think he’s right?’

‘No fear,’ said the inspector with a dry bark of a laugh. ‘I can feel that too, more like an earthquake than thunder – rumbling away underneath us. Not that I’ve ever felt an earthquake, mind, but you know what I mean. You’ll not give up, madam, will you?’

‘I certainly will not,’ I assured him.

‘But for all the underground turmoil,’ the inspector went on, ‘I can’t believe it was any of them that was off when it happened.’

‘Did you look for a trip or trap of any kind?’ I asked.

‘Sergeant McClellan did,’ Hutchinson said. ‘He couldn’t find a sniff of one and sniffing things out’s his party turn.’

‘If you could be said to have a party turn,’ I replied, ‘although it’s rather disrespectful to put it that way, I should have said it was… intuiting with such perspicacity as to appear psychic.’

‘Some parties you must go to, madam,’ the inspector said. ‘Aye well, there’s not much springs to my mind out of the spirit world or anywhere else. Except for this: Topsy’s stuff was slashed and then hidden or swapped. Ana’s stuff was swapped only – no damage done. That seems significant to me. And I’d like to know why old Ma Cooke and Charlie are in cahoots, wouldn’t you? The boss man has got wind of it, if you ask me, whatever it is. He’s a wee thundercloud all of his own.’

‘Thank you, Inspector,’ I said. ‘That gives me something to start on.’

‘That’s my-’ He broke off, but I should not have been offended to have been called his girl. Very far from it. I felt my chest swell.

‘And I assume that if I uncover anything incontrovertible, you’ll be ready to rejoin the fray.’

‘Just whistle,’ he said.

‘I’m surprised, though, Inspector Hutchinson, that you can’t talk your boss round. I should have said – and I mean this most admiringly, I assure you – that you could talk him off the edge of a cliff if need be.’

‘Oh, I could, I could,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Of course. Only I like to play my cards a wee bit closer. If I told him everything, the jail would be full and the caravans empty and I don’t want that.’

I nodded.

‘That’s exactly what I was just trying to tell my husband,’ I said. ‘As bad as it looks, these circus folk are decent, honest – well, honest-ish and if not then it’s for noble reasons – and don’t deserve any of this really. They don’t even suspect one another. They can’t quite believe she fell either, mind you. It’s left them utterly bewildered.’

‘Aye, either that or we’re a pair of fools,’ Inspector Hutchinson said and, tipping his hat, he left me.

I told myself that, while no one would ever find the notion outlandish when applied to me, Inspector Hutchinson was so very far from being a fool on his own that even with me beside him we did not add up to a pair and so I managed a very confident smile with which to greet Alec as he joined me.

‘Thought it best to lie low during the touching family reunion,’ he murmured. ‘Is he in a complete rage then?’

‘Pretty much,’ I said.

‘He does have a point, you know,’ Alec reasoned. It is one of the more annoying of his habits to champion Hugh to me at odd moments. I briefly considered trying to construct a defence but there were far more serious matters at hand.

‘So where are we?’ I said. ‘What do we think about Ina after what the inspector told us? Are you persuaded?’

‘Not entirely,’ Alec said.

‘Me too. Neither, I mean. Except that she did seem to know what it was that I shouted out while I was crossing the ring.’

‘I was puzzling about that,’ said Alec, ‘then I realised that she would still have heard you from outside the tent or round the back somewhere. Canvas, darling, you see? Anyway, we can check.’

‘How?’

‘Well, that’s the bad news – Robin Laurie, I’m afraid. He must have seen her leave and return. He’d be able to pin it down for us. And he could confirm whether she really did put her head down. But you’ll have to get off after him as soon as you possibly can because the memory won’t be a significant one and it will start to fade very quickly.’

‘I?’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘I’ll have to go running after him? Why not you?’

‘Because I’m going to stay here and use my old chumship with Miles Fanshawe to get closer than ever to the rest of them.’ This was unanswerable and Alec, knowing as much, gave me a rather sly grin. ‘I’m pretty sure I can reignite the old school spirit and turn it to good use.’

‘What is the old school spirit?’ I asked. ‘What’s the battle cry of the Harrovian?’

‘Let fortune attend those who dwell here,’ cried Alec, brandishing an imaginary and rather inapposite sword.

‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘Not exactly to the current point, is it?’

‘More impressive in Latin too,’ said Alec, putting the sword away. ‘But still, Miles for me and Robin Laurie for you.’

‘If I can even find him,’ I said. ‘He gets about, you know.’

‘He’s at Buckie,’ said Alec. ‘At the deathbed. And you’d better hurry, because as bad as it’s going to be for you to roll up now, crashing the funeral would be in very poor taste, don’t you agree?’