The Winter Ground

12

I still felt most acutely that I was being shunted offstage and leaving Alec in the thick of the action when I set out on the long drive north the next day. His central point could not be argued – I could certainly confirm Ina’s story by asking Robin Laurie – but, suspicious as her behaviour and her explanation for it were, I did not seriously entertain any idea that she was bound up in Ana’s death. Even if there had been time, there was no motive, and even if there were some motive I could not imagine, the act itself – the only act Ina could have performed – was so unlikely to have had the outcome it did that surely she would not have risked it: a circus girl shoved off her pony should have, would have in nine cases out of ten, simply rolled over and leapt to her feet, blazing angry and shouting the name of her attacker to the top of the king pole. If the act had been more than that, if Anastasia had been grabbed off her pony and her poor head deliberately struck against that cold, hard ground (I shrank from the very thought of it), then I was far from sure that it could have been the wan and willowy Mrs Wilson behind it.

All in all, then, a day’s drive and my uncomfortable insinuation of myself into a house of illness gearing up to be a house of mourning appeared to be taking diligence to its farthest point, and I was sulking. To be sure, I relished the prospect of keeping out of Hugh’s way for another day; I had stayed out late the night before, scratching supper with Alec at Dunelgar, and had risen long before dawn to get away before the household was stirring. I was mildly interested, too, to have another crack at the puzzle of Robin Laurie and Ina Wilson, for the animosity of the one made no more sense than the leering familiarity of the other. Still, I could not help but feel that Alec had kept the plum for himself and was worming his way into it in rather a selfish way, while I was being sent packing with a pat and a sandwich like an unwelcome child, not to return before bedtime.

I had forewarned them of my visit, stopping just short of actually asking permission to arrive (in case I was refused), and since this necessitated a telephone call it was hard to resist the temptation to let the telephone call take care of the entire business.

‘Be my guest,’ Alec had said – had drawled, in fact – lying back in his chair and stretching his legs out in front of him. He applied a match to his pipe and disappeared behind belching plumes of smoke, looking quite diabolical. ‘If you can work a telephone call around to the point and get the matter tied up neatly then three hurrahs for you. I shall listen and learn.’

Of course, he was right. I ascertained from the butler that there was no blanket ban on visitors and when Robin was summoned to the telephone I delivered the little speech Alec and I had concocted about my passing Cullen on my way to a visit at Cairnbulg and my wondering if I might stop in.

‘But of course,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘Of course.’ He spoke with such an air of understanding and with so little surprise that one could not miss the implication: that of course I wanted to see him; that ladies begging to see him was a cross which manfully he bore. On the other hand the implication was so subtly laid down that one could not counter it – to deny it would be to confirm it.

‘Latish on tomorrow then,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want dinner,’ and, blushing, I rang off. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said to Alec, who had not spoken.

Cullen, the estate of the lords of Banff and Buckie, unrivalled bosses of this particular corner of the eastern Highlands, at least since the MacDuff family, earls of Fife, had turned up their toes centuries before (for reasons never quite clear to me despite Hugh’s retellings, although I could not help slightly blaming Shakespeare), was a large square block of uninspiring scrub farmland bound on the north by battered coast, where grey villages alternated with grey cliffs, and unleavened by anything so dashing as a glen, a forest or even a heathery moor. (And when one finds oneself regretting the absence of a heathery moor, one knows one has arrived somewhere one should not linger.) The first time I had ever endured the endless slog up the side of the Spey and the even more endless chug along the coast road eastwards to Cairnbulg – for the friends were true, except in that they were Hugh’s friends and I would not voluntarily have paid them a visit if they had been giving away mink coats and diamonds – I had remarked aloud that the north coast was not actually that much worse than Perthshire. This was in the early years of my marriage before, by a combination of my learning some tact and Hugh’s stopping listening, I ceased giving daily affront. Hugh, who had not yet given up trying to educate me, informed me in clipped tones that we were not currently on the north coast, that the north coast was a hundred miles further up and was perfectly charming although not quite as lush as this, the Grampian coast. I had looked around at the dried-out grass, the sheep – who seemed, even for sheep, quite remarkably forlorn – and the few stunted trees, leafless already in September and bent over like crones by the ceaseless howling winds, and had said nothing.

Cullen Place itself, when I arrived there, came as rather a relief. I knew that there was a Castle Cullen, brooding on a headland somewhere hereabouts, but a practically minded Georgian had turned his back on the salt spray and had erected, in a sheltered dip a mile inland, a comfortable little mansion house after the style of John Nash – or it might even have been with the help of John Nash, I supposed, if the Buckies had been in funds at the time. It was, I could see as I swept up the drive and puttered around wondering where to leave my motor car, a cosy kind of overgrown cottage, facing south and catching the last fiery rays of the winter sun in its pink-washed plasterwork and in the bays and french windows it sported here and there wherever some Victorian inhabitant had felt they should like a better view or an easy stroll out to the gardens; a house made for the comfort of a family, one where the servants’ wing took up more space than the whole suite of formal apartments, and that is always a very good sign. I have spent far too many visits, cold, starved and wretched, amongst the marbles and Fragonards of the other kind of house ever to sniff at one which makes do with just two drawing rooms and concentrates itself instead on dairies, smokeries, fish stores, laundries, and above all a boiler house, reeking of coke and pumping delicious warmth around the place with the zeal of a speeding steam engine. I was sorry, as I walked up to the front door, that I had been so unequivocal about not staying for dinner or even stopping the night.

A parlour maid showed me into a ground-floor room at the back of the house before going to announce my arrival to ‘master’s brother’ and, thinking I should look less like a lamb on an altar if I were not seated when he entered, I wandered around while I waited, slapping out a little tune with my gloves. Oddly, the room had an air of disuse despite being decorated as a family apartment with its plump, mismatched cushions and its footstools worked in the drab and lumpy tapestry covers so redolent of captive girlhood. Well I remembered the lumpy tapestry covers I produced myself, with many a droplet of blood from my pricked fingers, in the empty years between dolls and cocktails (although the covers themselves were not around to remind me since my mother had been something of an aesthete and she had tended to beam at my footstools and send them straight to Granny).

The chimneypiece and tabletops hinted at an explanation: they were crowded with photographs, the silver frames gleaming, the glass twinkling and smelling faintly of lemon from a recent wash. There in the biggest and grandest frame of all was the wedding photograph of Lord and the new Lady Buckie, looking young, scared and rather strangled, he in his high collar and she in a hideous wedding dress which topped off its leg-of-mutton sleeves and pouter-pigeon bodice with a kind of surgical neck-brace in ivory brocade with a row of pearls under the chin. All around this one were gathered smaller photographs of the ensuing progeny: the christening portraits showing the same girl, less frightened now, clasping armfuls of frothing ruffles from which, in some of the pictures at least, a fat arm or sturdy booteed leg was waving in blurred abandon; later pictures of the children too, taken in this very room against the french windows, where they sulked in ribbons and buttoned boots, staring down the photographer and hating every minute of it. There were a few happier moments: a boy on a riverbank holding up an enormous perch and beaming; a big girl leaning forward on a black pony, hugging its neck; a row of small children on the same black pony with their sister proudly holding its nose; two small boys, one just a baby, got up as pixies in acorn-shaped caps and pointed slippers with shining buckles. It was hard to tell how many children there had been for the crowded frames might have easily held a multitude of different babies, toddlers and growing girls and boys snapped just once each and, before the younger ones had begun to take on the finished look of grown people with the same recognisable features every time, the pictures stopped. That must be it. Small wonder that the room was not the first choice of retreat for the widowed and now childless man who lived alone here. I turned away, heaving a sigh which I hoped would take such thoughts away with it when it left me, and jumped to see a figure in the doorway.

‘Dandy,’ said Robin. For once, he was not smirking and both of his eyebrows kept their line. If I had not known the circumstances, I should have said he was cross about something, but perhaps this was only another morsel of evidence that there was a tender heart beating underneath the elegant waistcoat and the teasing. He must have thought I was being a perfect ghoul, peering at the photographs of the dead babies; perhaps I was – not a pleasant notion and one which I batted firmly away, telling myself that if they did not want people to look at the pictures they could pack them away or show guests into another room. I refused to hang my head about it.

Sticking my chin resolutely in the air, then, I walked over and shook hands.

‘Robin, thank you for letting me stop off. It’s much appreciated. How is your brother, if you don’t mind my asking?’

Robin frowned, no more than a twitch, but I could not miss it.

‘He’s much iller than he or anyone else in this place will admit,’ he said.

I made a few inadequate sorry-noises.

‘Now, then,’ he went on, sitting opposite me and slinging one long leg over the other with a gay unconcern for his trouser creases. ‘Something to ask or something to tell?’

‘Neither,’ I said, possibly too stoutly to be quite plausible, but it had rattled me to have him cut to the heart of the visit that way. ‘I just can’t resist the chance to chew it all over again with one who was there. Most excitement there’s ever been within a day’s drive of Gilverton, and I’m utterly thwarted. The police are being the expected plods and the circus folk have turned Trappist to a man.’

‘Closed ranks, eh?’ he said. ‘Hardly surprising.’

‘Yes,’ I replied slowly. ‘Of course, one cannot help the thought that it was one of them, but it does occur to me’ – I tried to sound as though as I were only just realising this as I spoke – ‘it does occur to me that everyone in the crowd really should have been interviewed too. Plods, you see? Plods. They haven’t even asked for anyone’s addresses, Ina tells me, and now the case is all but wound up.’

‘And you said you had nothing to tell!’ Robin cried, flapping a hand at me in a gesture reminiscent of an elderly woman gossiping in the street. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he saw straight through my careful show of thinking aloud and was laughing at me. Still, what could I do but plough on?

‘I suppose that is news,’ I said, attempting a look of innocent surprise. ‘Yes, they think it was an accident. They think the pony bolted and Anastasia was just dreadfully unlucky.’

‘Anastasia?’ he said. ‘That was the girl?’

‘I nodded.

‘So why the desperate urge to “chew it over”?’ said Robin. ‘If it’s all done and dusted, as you say. You are confirming a view of your sex that ladies more often seek to overturn.’ He flicked a glance at the silver-framed photographs again as he spoke but he was twinkling at me, the frowns quite vanished. I flushed and decided that I would have to take a more purposeful tack.

‘To be perfectly frank,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling rather uneasy about something. My conscience is pricking me.’

Robin opened his eyes very wide, looking thrilled and horrified in equal measure.

‘She was an unappealing girl, to be sure,’ I went on.

‘I shouldn’t have said so,’ said Robin. ‘I’d have taken the little one on the rope if given a choice but… Oh dear, now I’ve shocked you.’

‘Not at all,’ I retorted, although he had. ‘Her character, I mean. Terribly difficult for the Cookes to manage – disruptive, eccentric – but if it wasn’t an accident, then no matter what her shortcomings, she deserves more than to be tidied away and forgotten. Do you see?’

‘And are you going to tell the police about this pricked conscience? This unease? Whatever it is,’ said Robin.

‘Possibly,’ I replied. ‘Except that it’s more than likely nothing to do with Anastasia at all and one doesn’t like to cause mischief willy-nilly.’ Of course, causing mischief willy-nilly was one of Robin Laurie’s favourite pastimes and so I hurried on. ‘It’s about when Mrs Wilson slipped out, during the show. She can’t give me any very plausible account of where she went or why or even when.’

‘And should she?’ said Robin. ‘Give you an account of herself, I mean.’

‘Not – no – not in the ordinary way of things, of course. Why would she? But only just because I knew she’d gone and I asked her about it instead of telling the inspector and so I thought she should come clean, to repay the favour. To set my mind at ease.’

‘And how did you come to know that she had slipped out?’ said Robin.

‘I happened to turn around and I saw that she wasn’t there.’

‘Really? You do surprise me. You turned around, turned away from the spectacle?’

‘Just briefly.’

Normally, one would say that Robin Laurie’s gaze was all show, his eyes flashing a message of mischief out to the world, but just then he was also gazing to see, taking everything in that he could, drinking it in. After a moment, he seemed to come to a conclusion.

‘Am I to understand, Dandy, that you think dear Ina might have bashed the circus girl on the head and you would like me to be her character witness and alibi?’

I would far rather it had not come to this, for Robin Laurie was the last man on earth to be trusted with a woman’s reputation; I could just hear him pointing her out to his chums and telling them that she owed him her freedom – nay, her neck!

‘Let’s say I should feel a little more comfortable about not telling the police if… if it were on your head as well as mine.’

There was another long pause and then he grinned at me, a fresh, uncomplicated grin like a schoolboy’s.

‘Yes, she slipped out,’ he said. ‘She didn’t catch my eye or wave or anything. She’s not my biggest fan, you know, although she hides it marvellously. I’d have said she was going for a quiet smoke if she’d been anyone else. And it was ages before all the fun began.’

‘I see,’ I said, shuddering a little at the word he chose. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what she told me.’

His shoulders dropped a little as though from a small tension let go. ‘Did she tell you what she was doing?’ he asked.

‘She did, but…’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have you betray a confidence for the world.’

‘Oh, bother it! There’s no “confidence” to betray,’ I said, once again finding myself hooked by an unspoken implication, this time that Ina was up to something not to be mentioned in the hearing of men. ‘I must say, you have an uncanny knack for-’ He bent his head in eagerness to hear the end of this and I bit it off. ‘She went out to the moonlight, to regroup.’

‘Regroup?’ said Robin. ‘And it wasn’t moonlight that night, by the way.’

‘Well, the starlight, then. Yes, to regroup. To reignite her innocent excitement about the circus show, which had been driven off by the crowds and… very well you know this… by you!’

He nodded sagely and explored the inside of one cheek with his tongue.

‘And you believe that, eh?’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Behave.’ I had finally been provoked into treating him as though he were a child. He sat back, triumphant, counting this a victory. ‘So,’ I continued, trying not to look or sound stern, ‘in summary, she slipped out, just for a minute or two, and back in again, and this quite early on.’

‘More than a minute or two, I’d have said,’ Robin replied. ‘Long enough to subject these “stars” to a thorough inspection, but otherwise that’s about it.’

‘And later?’

‘Later?’

‘When I turned around and couldn’t see her, it was actually later than this starlight trip we’ve been discussing. It was just as we were realising something was wrong.’

‘She went out twice?’ said Robin. ‘Is that what she said?’

‘Is that what you say?’ I asked him. It was one of the first rules of detecting not to provide the witness with a story to confirm or deny, but instead to coax the story out of his own mouth, from his own memory, but my word it was an odd way to carry on with someone who did not know what one was up to. Robin Laurie was staring at me in a most squirm-inducing way.

‘I’m not saying what she did,’ I said, trying to help him along, ‘only that I couldn’t see her. She wasn’t visible.’

He looked more perplexed than ever. ‘She was invisible?’

I could feel a flush beginning to spread up from my collar, but just then he smacked his hands together and laughed the boyish laugh again.

‘Oh, I get it!’ he said. ‘You couldn’t see her! Yes, of course, she put her head down on her lap, didn’t she?’

‘Thank you!’ I exclaimed, flooding with relief. ‘That’s what I meant. She said she was bent over in her seat, feeling faint and doing what one is supposed to do to get the blood flowing.’

‘I thought at the time she was having some difficulty with her stocking,’ Robin said. ‘I almost offered to help.’

Ordinarily, I should have frowned at this, but I was so grateful to have got around the awkward corner that I smiled at him. This time we both sat back in our seats and let huge breaths go.

‘Now,’ said Robin, presently, rummaging in his waistcoat pocket and then flipping open his watch with an extravagant gesture. ‘Tea? Or a drink perhaps? I took you at your word about dinner, I’m afraid, but if you didn’t mind taking pot luck…’

‘No! Heavens no,’ I said, making those vague and meaningless patting gestures at my hair and clothes which, who knows how, have come to betoken imminent departure.

‘My brother… I don’t ask the kitchen to put four courses in the dining room for me every night… but you’re very welcome.’

‘I shouldn’t dream of it,’ I said, standing, having an abhorrence of being that most burdensome of all burdens: the unexpected guest.

With nothing to look forward to except the Brodies of Cairnbulg, then, I took my leave. Dinner, two hours of cards, bed, breakfast and off again, I told myself, and it was in a good cause. I stepped into my motor car and slammed the door. Hours and hours of driving, a disgusting dinner, two hours of cards played geologically slowly and with much discussion – Ernest and Daphne were well known for their habit, when a rubber had got away from them, of requiring their guests to lay all hands on the table for a post-mortem. How the sister-in-law who made her home there stood it, I cannot imagine, except to say that she was always drunk by tea. After the card lesson, nothing but a hard bed in a cold room, porridge of the stiffest order and the same hours of driving all over again. All to find out that Ina Wilson had been telling me the truth about her short trip out to the starlight that night and why I could not see her when I looked.

Yet it was not just the prospect of the Brodies that kept me sitting there on the gravel at Cullen instead of dragging myself off down the drive (although they helped). A far weightier anchor was the niggling little voice in my head telling me that it did not add up, and that even if it was a tiny question, invisible to the naked eye, and even if marching back in there and asking about it would destroy any shreds of the cloak of casual interest under which I had hoped to hide and would reveal my mission to be a mission, it would still be there like a pea under twenty feather beds every night, and that sooner or later I would be on the telephone anyway, shredding my casual cloak the finer.

Quite simply, if Ina Wilson, as Robin had just confirmed, really did have her head in her lap fighting faintness when I looked round, then she had put her head there before the scream, and that might have been because she knew the scream was coming, because she knew what was happening, because – taking the argument to its conclusion – she had somehow made it happen and was sickened by remembering it.

The sun had gone completely now and the house looked tired suddenly, the pink plaster cold and the windows dark and blank. I crossed the porch and opened the inner doors to the hall. (My return would be less peculiar, I thought, if I treated it as a second thought and did not summon a servant with the bell.) Almost at the same time, a door opposite me opened, spilling lamplight into the dimness. A tall figure stepped slowly into the square of light and stood there silhouetted, looking back at me.

‘Ah good,’ I said, ‘sorry to disturb you again, but there’s something troubling me.’

‘I’m sorry?’ came the voice, and I started. What could possibly have befallen Robin in the time it took me to go out to the drive and come back again that could have taken the drawl out of his voice and left that weariness in place of it? I moved forward.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a bee in my bonnet for some reason.’

‘Who are you?’ the voice said.

I was only steps away from him now and yet still, as I gazed up at his face, I could not make sense of it. Not until I looked downwards and saw the cardigan jersey, the bagged corduroys and the carpet slippers, did I realise my blunder.

‘Lord Buckie?’

‘Who are you?’ he said again, and I could hear a very faint echo of his brother’s voice as his surprise gave way to a natural amusement.

‘I- Oh my goodness, I do apologise. Yes. My name is Gilver – Dandy… lion. I dropped in to see Robin and I just… I haven’t come for the silver. Don’t worry.’

‘Well, I’m afraid he has gone out,’ he said. ‘Might I relay a message from you?’

‘Not really,’ I said, feathers of panic begin to tickle at me. I did not want to have to tell this man about Anastasia’s death. ‘I could leave a note, perhaps. Will he be gone long?’ Not having heard a motor car, I suppose I imagined that he had taken a dog for a walk or something.

‘He could be.’ Lord Buckie – it was a struggle not to think of him as ‘the old man’ and yet I knew he was barely fifty – treated me to a considering look, deciding whether to go on. ‘I expect he has gone visiting. Of course, you are very welcome to wait.’ He bowed slightly and ushered me towards the open door behind him. I made a slight bow in return and trooped wordlessly to where he was pointing. It was only after I got there that I regretted it.

It was his library, and quite clearly his bolthole, one comfortable chair drawn up by the fire and a table littered with books, pipes and spectacle cases. There were not, as far as I could see, any of the expected accoutrements of serious illness, no bath chair or chaise, not even any medicine bottles or so much as a blanket, nothing but the thinness of his legs under their corduroy trousers and the bony chest above the cardigan buttons to speak of his frailty. His skin too, I saw as I came into the light, was stretched pale and papery over his cheekbones. Only in silhouette could he ever be mistaken for his brother, one of them as lithe as a green willow-wand and the other as dry and hollow as a reed. He settled back down into his chair and waved me into a seat on a hard sofa against the wall.

‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?’

‘Quite sure,’ I said.

‘Then might I offer a little advice?’ he went on.

I nodded, rather puzzled.

‘I am very fond of my brother,’ he said, ‘but I have no illusions about him. If I were you, Miss Gilver, I should count myself lucky that he was not here today and I should give it up now. I mean no disrespect to you in saying so, my dear, quite the reverse and I hope I haven’t shocked you.’

He had, of course, horrified me and at the same time had flattered me more than I had ever been flattered in my life.

‘Lord Buckie, we seem to be at cross-purposes. I’m Mrs Gilver. From Gilverton.’

‘Hugh Gilver’s wife?’ said Lord Buckie. ‘Hugh Gilver’s wife, here to see Robin?’ Now I was in even greater danger of collapsing into giggles; of course, he must have some experience of the odd Mrs coming mooning around after Robin as well as the hopeful Misses, tails wagging and hearts about to break.

‘I’m on my way to Cairnbulg,’ I said, and I had never been more grateful to know the stainless Brodies, all but pasteurised in their rectitude. ‘I just dropped in in passing, truly, and am in no need of your protection.’

At last, the earnest look fell away from him and he sat back and gave a short laugh.

‘But why did you drop in to see Robin alone and not me too?’ he said. ‘I’m always happy to have some company. Really, you can hardly blame me for thinking it a tryst.’

‘I had heard you were ill,’ I said. ‘I had got the idea that you were…’

‘At death’s door?’ said Lord Buckie, baldly. ‘Or halfway up the drive? Unfortunately not.’

‘Hardly unfortunately,’ I said, very uncomfortable. ‘Thankfully, mercifully.’ I should have kept quiet, for the discomfort only grew.

‘Oh no, you mustn’t say that, my dear,’ he said. ‘Whatever fleeting moment of sorrow you would feel to read over breakfast one morning that Old Buckie had popped off at last, it cannot count against my claims.’ I frowned and shook my head slightly, not following him. ‘My life has long been a burden to me,’ he explained. ‘Its loss would be a release.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, cursing myself for being drawn into this. No wonder he did not get many visitors if this was how he entertained them.

‘Please don’t be,’ he replied, and went on: ‘Eternal rest and an end to cares. What reason is there to be sorry?’ Well, I thought, I was sorry I had come and sat down in this library for a start. With dismay, I realised that the question was not a rhetorical one; he was looking at me, expecting an answer.

‘You said you were fond of your brother,’ I blurted out. ‘And from hearing him speak I know how much he cares for you too. That’s something worth living for.’

‘I have lost more than a brother can ever make up for,’ he answered. ‘I wish I could believe that I shall see them all again – my housekeeper never tires of trying to convince me – but at least I shall stop missing them. I could give up twenty brothers – even twenty Robins – to stop missing them.’ At the close of this speech, quite the most doleful I think I had ever heard in the whole course of my life, he finally took pity on me and rallied a little. ‘But how cheering to hear that Robin speaks kindly of me in my absence. I never imagine the parties he attends to be places where relatives are asked after.’

‘It was not a typical gathering,’ I admitted. ‘But he did seem – and it was remarkable to me too – to be a very family-minded young man.’ It was with some surprise that I realised this was true: all of the poison regarding Robin’s cold-hearted desire for his inheritance had come from the gossip of others and the only words I had heard from the horse’s mouth spoke of warm feelings and a heart which could grieve with the best of them. ‘He does hide his finest qualities very skilfully, doesn’t he?’

‘Good God, no!’ said Lord Buckie, near laughter again. ‘That’s exactly how he does it, my dear. He doesn’t hide his tender heart. Not at all! He offers tantalising glimpses of it in between the roguery and every woman between twenty and fifty decides that she can save him.’

Not every woman, I thought to myself. Ina Wilson, for one, was having none of it.

‘But I love him dearly,’ Lord Buckie went on. ‘He has such claims on my heart that I forgive him anything.’

‘I have a brother myself,’ I said, ‘and a sister, and you make me ashamed, Lord Buckie, for I am not sure I would ever describe my own family feeling in quite that way.’

‘It’s more than family feeling,’ he replied. Then he gave me a shrewd look. ‘Forgive me, I can see how uncomfortable I’m making you.’ He paused while I mumbled a pointless denial. ‘But I rarely get the chance to speak of them…’ A pause and a sigh. ‘When my dear wife died’ – I could not help a sinking feeling, seeing that our excursion away from doom was over – ‘all but one of my children were already gone. And that one, my oldest, wasn’t even sick. She didn’t have it.’

‘I know,’ I said gently.

‘She drowned.’ He looked up at me. ‘And Robin almost drowned trying to save her. Did you know that?’ I shook my head. ‘I have never forgiven myself.’

‘For what?’ I asked him.

‘When her mother died, I meant to rouse her, to stop her sinking into the kind of grief I feared she was too young to bear, but instead I only added to it and…’

‘I am sure you could not have done that, Lord Buckie,’ I said.

‘I told her she was more than enough for me, that we would be everything to one another now. It must have seemed that I was asking her for strength she did not possess, that I was asking her not to mourn. So she went to the cliffs and threw herself into the sea.’

I gasped.

‘I – I – thought it was an accident,’ I said.

‘We managed to keep it very quiet,’ he said. ‘Or rather Robin managed. Out of kindness to me. And so I could forgive him pretty well anything. Even his afternoons of visiting.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘visiting! A young widow? I hope not the wife or daughter of one of your men.’ I was trying desperately to lighten the mood. ‘Very bad for the estate, that kind of thing.’

‘A retired piano teacher,’ said Lord Buckie, himself making a brave effort to sound cheerful. ‘But between you and me, my dear, she still sees one pupil. Robin is always to be found there whenever he’s feeling ruffled. She lives in the head groom’s cottage as was and pays her rent on time.’

‘A retired piano teacher?’ I was trying and failing to picture Robin Laurie drinking tea in a cottage with my first piano teacher, Miss Cribb – moon-faced Miss Cribb with her slightly crossed eyes and her bun so tightly scraped back. I always wondered that it had not managed to uncross them.

‘Well, my housekeeper maintains that she might well know how to dance on a piano but nothing more.’ He was almost animated as he spoke, and I considered, quietly to myself, the growing puzzle of Robin Laurie. A scamp? A blister? Could any man who lit his ailing brother’s final hours this way be all that bad? Could anyone who jumped into the sea to save his niece be a cad at heart? Could anyone who kept up something as cosy as this afternoon arrangement with the piano teacher really be the kind of wrecker who deserved all of Ina Wilson’s disdain?

In fact, I told myself later as I drove away, Ina Wilson’s view of Laurie was getting curiouser all the time. For it seemed to me that the shared influenza nurse must have seen Robin the brother and Robin the uncle at his most impressive and endearing and could only have praised him to the heavens to her next patient. Well, perhaps the nurse was pretty and Robin had seduced her or perhaps – this was much more likely – Ina, knowing that he was a poppet underneath, found his veneer all the more tiresome and did not trouble to hide it. Perhaps she was one of the many who had tried to save him, got stung and retired, smarting.