Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (12 page)

‘Jolly good,’ I said. ‘And I suppose you didn’t see the mysterious stranger?’ He was shaking his head before the words were out of my mouth.

‘I did not. Cissie said she wanted to go a walk instead of sittin’’ – the blush deepened until he was almost purple from collar to hairline – ‘’cos of there bein’ other folk about and, to be straight wi’ youse, I didn’t really believe her.’ I pulled my eyebrows down again, not liking the sound of this at all. ‘Sitting’, as Reid called it, had to be at the lady’s discretion, surely. I could not think how to put this into words, however, without killing him off from embarrassment and quite possibly sending Alec with him. Besides, my eyebrows seemed to be doing the job on their own. He hung his head and scraped his boots against the floor and we left it there.

Outside in the cafe the luncheon trade had picked up again to full strength after the break in service. Orders were being shouted, the bell on the till was dinging, the rush and sizzle of hot fat as cold chips poured into it broke out over and over again. All that was missing was Joe’s voice, describing his wonders and urging the crowd to ‘eat, eat, eat, eat’ as he had with Alec and me at breakfast time.

‘Quiet the day, Gee-seppy,’ one wag called over the counter.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve dropped yer tongue in the batter there,’ said another and a chorus of laughter rang out all around. Not quite friendly laughter. Perhaps these villagers, more than happy to eat his food and give him their money, had not yet welcomed him in as one of their own. Joe nodded, unsmiling, and carried on plunging, shaking, wrapping, telling the price and counting out the change until at last the crowd thinned to a stream, broke into dribs and drabs and finally stuttered out, just one or two stragglers looking for bargains. Then, at last, silence and emptiness and Joe turned the sign on the door.

‘Right then,’ said Alec. ‘To Dunskey Cove with us all.’ Joe was out in the privy in the yard washing the luncheon-time lard from his hands and face.

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Not twice in one day.’ Alec nodded as though only just remembering.

‘In all the commotion I never asked you, Dan,’ he said. ‘Why
were
you there? How did that come to be?’

‘The police thought it might be a mistress from the school,’ I said, turning to Reid. ‘You heard that Mademoiselle Beauclerc was missing?’

‘Who?’ said Reid. ‘No.’

‘Well, not to say missing, but gone anyway,’ I said. ‘Like so many before her.’

‘But how could you help?’ Alec said. ‘You never met the woman.’

‘Fleur volunteered and I tagged along,’ I said. I turned to Reid again. ‘You must have heard about all the departures.’ Reid pushed out his lips and shook his head.

‘Don’t have much to do wi’ them up there,’ he said. ‘Gey queer set-up havin’ a bunch of women all doing science and geography and out on the cliff in their semmets at dawn.’

‘Really?’ said Alec.

‘Gymnastics,’ said Reid.

‘Ah,’ Alec said. Then to me: ‘Fleur volunteered?’ I nodded.

‘And if you don’t mind me askin’, missus,’ said Reid, ‘what did she mean by what she said when she was in there?’ I stared at him.

‘I thought you hadn’t heard,’ I said. ‘You asked her to repeat it.’

‘I thought maybe I hadn’t heard
right
,’ said Reid. ‘I asked to make sure.’ He turned to Alec. ‘Five, she said, sir. She looked at the corpse and said the word “five”.’

‘No!’ said Alec.

‘So what I was wondering,’ said Reid, ‘was five what?’

‘Bodies,’ said Alec.

‘Alec!’ I said, putting up my hand in front of his face and startling him.

‘Murders,’ said Alec.

‘Stop it,’ I said, almost loud enough to call it shouting. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘What’s goin’ on?’ said Reid.

‘You refused to tell the sergeant about your witness just because you wanted to keep her to yourself!’ I said. I was glaring at him and I knew my cheeks were reddening with anger. ‘And then you blurt that out before I’ve even had a chance to talk to Fleur!’

‘What do you mean?’ Alec said. ‘Why didn’t you talk to her right away?’

‘What five murders?’ said Reid.

‘She was upset,’ I said. ‘I was upset. Wait till you’ve been and looked at it and then carp at me.’

‘What five murders?’ said Reid even louder. I rounded on him.

‘Constable,’ I said, ‘unless you want me to march right up the hill and tell Mrs Turner that you and her maid are in the habit of “sitting” on the cliff at Dunskey Castle on your free evenings, you’ll forget all about Mr Osborne’s indelicate outburst until I’m ready to discuss it with you. After I’ve discussed it with Miss Lipscott.’ I ignored the whispering little voice inside me.

‘Five mistresses have gone missing from St Columba’s,’ said Alec.

‘Aye?’ said Reid, his interest in the ‘bunch of women’ piqued at last.

‘And Miss Lipscott . . .’ said Alec.

‘Miss Lipscott said an unguarded word in a moment of great strain,’ I finished for him. ‘She is clearly . . . troubled. Perhaps ill. But her story is too preposterous to be true.’

‘Why not tell me what her story is and if ye’re right I’ll no’ believe it,’ said Reid. ‘Five mistresses missing and Miss Lipscott . . .?’

I glared a little more at Alec and then let my breath go and sat back in my chair.

‘All right, I give up,’ I said. ‘Miss Lipscott said last evening that she had killed four times.’

‘And then today . . .’ said Reid. ‘She saw that poor corpse and said, “That makes it five”?’

‘She said “Five”, as you well know,’ I reminded him. ‘Why, it might not even have been connected to the four from yesterday.’

‘Oh, come off it, Dandy,’ said Alec.

‘You should have told me there and then,’ Reid said.

‘I ready as ever I be.’ Joe Aldo was standing in the kitchen door. His hair was slicked flat and his face was scrubbed red and raw. His shirt cuffs were rolled down and his cuff-links fastened. He took a coat from the back of a kitchen chair and shrugged into it.

‘Right you are, Mr Aldo,’ said Reid. He stood and gave rather a withering look to be coming from a boy in his twenties to a great grand lady like me. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘since you’re all ready to go an’ that. It would be a shame to keep you hangin’ around while I just run and arrest somebody.’ Joe Aldo was blinking in some confusion.

‘I’ll fetch the sergeant if you like and tell him everything,’ I said. ‘Everything.’ Reid blushed again.

‘But look on the bright side,’ he said to Aldo. ‘From what I’ve just heard, chances are, it’s no’ your wife at all. Chances are, your wife’ll be back here wonderin’ where you’ve got to before we’re halfway home.’

Alec nodded but I could not bring myself to agree. Rosa Aldo had been on the cliff top on Tuesday evening and now was gone. A woman’s body had washed up at the cliff foot on Saturday after three days or so in the sea. I did not see why Fleur Lipscott would have killed her and I agreed that the five mistresses gone and five murders claimed was a neat little balance, but I would not have raised Joe’s hopes that way.

I waved them off in the motorcar – the sergeant was nowhere to be seen and one could only conclude that he had walked back to the station or perhaps climbed the hill to his wife and home. Reid drove and Alec and Joe sat in the back. I watched after them until the little car had disappeared from view at the top of the hill and even then I followed them in my imaginings, along the road and onto the lane, down the track and onto the path, across the shingle and into the building there. I remembered all I could of the woman I had seen. Were her clothes and her stockings French like Mademoiselle Beauclerc’s would be? Were they Italian? Would Rosa Aldo have Italian clothes or would she be dressed like every other washerwoman in Portpatrick, in clothes made up to Woolworth’s patterns in cloth from the local Co-operative store? I tried to think of the look of her dress and the scrap of lace at her neck. But it had been soaked and clumped with water and the frill at her neck was rusty with blood and brine mixed. For just a moment I wished I had returned in the motorcar. I could have looked at her clothes and tried not to see the rest of her. I could have surely found something to tell me
something
. I leaned over the harbour wall and looked down into the water, just beginning to slosh against the stones. If I fell in there when it was deep and was fished out after three days, what could they tell about me? Good underclothes made of decent silk and fine wool, skilfully mended here and there. A rather flashy shirt that Grant had got from London on postal order and Jenner’s Ladies’ best tweeds in greenish grey. I would look – on a slab in the cable station – like a Scotch matron of exactly my type and exactly my years, and I determined there and then to let Grant buy me some flashy skirts and coats to go with the shirt next time she was ordering.

Then I remembered Miss Lovage from the evening before – and Miss Shanks with her cloaks – and I shuddered. I had been inoculated against theatricality in dress by my mother’s trailing sleeves and by her penchant for the sort of embroidery that belonged on the back of a kimono, if anywhere. Perhaps Fleur in her beige had it right after all, dressing like the schoolmistress she had become, with not a scrap left about her of the child I remembered so well.

I smiled. Even then, when every girl and boy was beribboned and befrilled to the point of immobility and forced to be good (given the effort required to be naughty when one had so many elaborate garments to haul around with one), Fleur Lipscott had been renowned in the family, the village and beyond for the costumes she concocted day by day. There was a foundation layer – what archaeologists, or quite possibly geologists, call a substratum – of woollen underclothes, linen and lace petticoats, muslin and lawn frocks: the stuff of Edwardian childhood, but to it Fleur added trimmings of her own devising, unearthed and scavenged from all around her domain. She wore camphorous stoles and tippets found in the attic trunks, voluminous plaids spun by the crofter women around the Highland hunting lodge, a cage of crinoline hoops embellished with rag ribbons so that she looked like an enormous birdcage full of fluttering budgerigars. She found amongst the Major’s uniforms more items of interest than might have seemed likely: epaulettes and medal ribbons, sashes and spurs, hat-bands and waistcoats, and a greatcoat of such length and girth and unyielding thickness that she rather inhabited it as a dwelling than wore it like clothes. When she walked in this last item it made one think of how the pyramid stones were moved, impossibly slowly, on rolling logs. She always emerged with hot cheeks and damp hair and to our laughter and quizzical looks she would say that it was indeed rather warm but good for thinking. Then she would resettle her Indian headdress or pirate’s tricorne and sweep grandly off to another adventure.

‘Darling little goose,’ I remember Pearl saying once, gazing after her.

‘And she slogs like a slave at it,’ Aurora had agreed. ‘That hat was miles too big until she put the rats in it.’

Batty Aunt Lilah let out a small shriek and shot to her feet, calling Fleur back and demanding explanations.

‘Not
rats
, Batty Aunt,’ said Fleur, bowing so that her hat fell off into her hand. ‘Not
Rattus rattus
, although I don’t hate them like you do.’ She rummaged inside the tricorne and extracted an object which looked distressingly like a member of the
Rattus rattus
family to me. Batty Aunt Lilah shrieked again and recoiled from it.

‘It’s my hair!’ said Fleur, holding the thing in the palm of her hand to show it clearly. ‘Stitched up in a net. You know I found that old ratter of Granny’s and couldn’t resist it? Still in its box, with instructions and everything. I made three of my own and now I’m doing Aurora and Pearl. Separately, for hygiene, but I must say, Pearl, either you’re not brushing properly or Rora’s going bald, because she’s surging ahead of you. Come to my room and I’ll show you.’

‘You horrid child!’ said Pearl, pretending to shiver although really she was laughing. ‘I knew you’d been skulking in the bathroom. I never dreamed why!’

‘You’ll thank me when fashions change back again and you’re all ready for them,’ said Fleur, carefully inserting the rat back into the crown of the tricorne. ‘It’s not everyone who can be out of fashion and look remarkable instead of just peculiar.’ Then – dressed, under the greatcoat, in pale grey patent skating boots with the blades removed and an old sari – she had gone about her day.

How I wished that little ribbon-ringleted Fleur was here today, prattling on without a care for who heard and what they made of it. Even the second Fleur, the painted and sequinned girl I had met only once and who had left such a searing impression upon me, would have been welcome; for although she was far from that innocent child who spoke without thinking, at least she
spoke
. She twittered and giggled and made spiked little jibes and, like any flirt, at times she gave away more than she meant to, reaching for a joke, playing out her line to its end to hook the laugh she had spotted there.

Still, I should go up and find her, even the silent self-possessed woman she was now. I turned and leaned my back against the harbour wall, staring up at the school. She must surely be back by now, no matter how rambling a path she had taken home from the cove. With the thought, that sick feeling returned to somewhere deep inside me, but once again I swallowed and let it pass, not giving it form in my mind, not even examining it to see what form it would take. Instead I pushed myself up off the wall and strolled around the arm of the harbour, just like the fisherwives, all of us waiting for our men to return.

Fisherwives, I soon concluded, were better at waiting than me. In less time than it would have taken one of them to retie her shawl, fill her pipe and enquire in that rolling Gallovidian drawl after the health of the next fisherwife along the wall, I had grown bored and was marching back into the heart of the town. I was bound for the kiosk to ring home and tell them all where I was if needed, thence to St Columba’s, but I had hardly begun the long haul up the Main Street when I saw the police motorcar trundling down. Alec’s arm appeared, waving madly, in the side window as he saw me too and he jumped out while Constable Reid was still in the early stages of braking.