Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (13 page)

‘It’s not her,’ he said, lolloping towards me in enormous strides. ‘It’s not Rosa. Joe was quite certain.’

The motorcar crossed the street and drew up beside us. Constable Reid was in the shadows, but I thought I could still discern a frosty look on his face as he nodded a greeting. I ignored him and leaned in at the back where Joe Aldo was sitting bolt upright with a fist clenched on each knee, staring straight ahead.

‘You’re sure, Mr Aldo?’ I said. He turned his head immeasurably slowly and showed me stricken eyes with black circles under them.

‘My head,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘My head is to break in pieces.’

‘Tension,’ I said. ‘You must go home and rest. It must have been horrid for you until you knew.’

Perhaps his headache was too severe to let him nod, but he squeezed his eyes shut and tilted his head just a fraction.

‘Is not Rosa,’ he said. ‘Dress, hair. I roll her sleeves and is not Rosa’s skin. Rosa has . . .’ He poked his finger here and there over his other forearm as if to dot it.

‘Freckles?’ I said.

‘From the soap.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘But might not the sea water have . . .?’

‘
Sottoveste
,’ said Joe, gesturing. ‘Under. Underneath.’

‘Petticoats?’ I said. He nodded. ‘But—’

‘Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘It’s not her. They were married for fifteen years.’

‘And the lady, poor lady, is too . . . Rosa is a little apple. My little peach, my little plum.’

But it was what Alec had said that convinced me. I can never understand it when one reads in the Sunday papers that a headless torso has been found
sans
legs,
sans
arms, in a suitcase, and no one can guess who it might be. If the torso were part of a husband then I should think the wife would know. I could tell any part of Hugh big enough to fill a suitcase, certainly.

Besides, this tussle between Alec and me was becoming ridiculous. He could carry on alone desiring my client’s sister to be a murderess; I was no longer going to desire his client’s wife to be drowned.

‘If you’re gettin’ out here, Mr Aldo,’ said Constable Reid, ‘I’ll swing round and get up by.’ He jerked his head in the direction of St Columba’s. ‘Are you comin’?’ he asked me. I was not, I noted, worthy of even a ‘missus’ now, never mind a ‘madam’. I hesitated; I did not want to consign Fleur to being arrested without an ally, but I could not promise to be a staunch one. I would not lie.

Before I had decided, we were interrupted by the sound of a bell being rung with great energy a little way up the street. I squinted, shading my eyes from the sun, and could see a large woman dressed in a shopkeeper’s overall pulling on a bell chain as though her life depended upon it. The bell itself was attached to a cottage wall, accompanied by no blue light or red plaque and quite a way from the harbour.

‘Is that the lifeboat bell?’ I said, nevertheless.

All around, street doors were opening but it was not burly lifeboat men who emerged. Instead, housewives in their aprons and old men in carpet slippers, holding their newspapers open at the racing news, stepped out and looked up the street.

‘Post office telephone,’ said Reid from inside the motorcar.

‘It’s for that Mr Al-do,’ cried out the bell-ringing woman. ‘Him fae the chip shop.’

A cluster of children had gathered around her, Pied-Piper-style, and were clamouring.

‘Me, me, Miss Broon.’

‘I’ll gan, Miss Broon.’

‘I’ve no’ been chose for donkey’s.’

The doors were closing on withdrawing villagers and, as the street cleared, Miss Brown (could it be another tentacle of that same family, I wondered) noticed us standing further down; noticed Joe Aldo, anyway.

‘Mr Al-do?’ she called, again managing to make two blameless little syllables sound as though they had taken a huge effort of concentration to pronounce. ‘There’s somebody asking for you on the telephone.’ She looked back at the post office door and deigned to walk a little way down the street towards us.

‘I’ll get ’im, Miss Broon,’ said the most tenacious of the children, the others having given up and begun a game of marbles in the gutter. ‘You cannae leave the desk and all the stamps and money. I’ll tell him. Save you shouting.’ But Joe was walking up towards her now. Alec and I trailed after him, and Constable Reid threw the police motorcar into its reversing gear and backed slowly up the hill too.

‘Me?’ said Joe as he drew near Miss Brown. ‘Inside?’

‘It was pure luck you were so close,’ she said, with a strong note of disapproval which I could not easily fathom. ‘By rights you should be tipping a message boy a penny.’

‘Aye!’ said the tenacious child.

‘Somebody on the telephone for me?’ said Joe again.

‘And she’ll no’ be best pleased if you keep her hangin’,’ Miss Brown told him. ‘Never mind me needin’ to get back to the counter. Are you comin’ or no’?’

‘She?’ said Alec. Joe had returned to his blank, dead state again. ‘It might be her,’ Alec prompted him. ‘It might be Rosa.’ Joe blinked and then started as if a shock had passed through him. He barrelled inside the post office, fairly shoving Miss Brown out of the way. Alec and I started after him but she stepped in front of the doorway.

‘Do youse two have Post Office business?’ she said. ‘For there’s no loitering.’ Then she turned on her heel and swept in, muttering about ‘you people’, whoever that might be. Of course, all that happened was that we loitered outside instead, and with us Constable Reid, his engine running. In under a minute, Joe was back, the circles under his eyes darker than ever and his face paler. His hand shook as he opened the door and his voice shook as he spoke.

‘Is Rosa,’ he said. ‘Rosa to say she is leave me. No say where she is.’

‘Excuse me, Mr Al-do?’ said Miss Brown, coming fussing out after him. ‘Do you know you’ve left my good telephone hanging down where it’ll scratch all my varnish?’

‘Talk to her!’ said Joe, taking hold of Alec’s lapels and clutching him until they were nose to nose.

‘If you’ve damaged Post Office property . . .’ said Miss Brown.

Joe swayed and his face turned a ghastly shade of grey. Alec reached out and put both arms around him. He threw me a desperate look. Quickly, I slipped into the post office to the kiosk in the back corner and caught the earpiece, which was indeed swinging at the end of its cord.

‘Mrs Aldo?’ I said. There was a sharp buzzing as she sobbed, or possibly gasped, at the other end of the line. ‘Mrs Aldo?’

‘
Si
,’ came a faint whisper. ‘Is me.’

‘Mrs Aldo, I know I’m a stranger but if you could see the state of your husband at this minute, you couldn’t, no matter what the temptations . . .’

Now she was sobbing for sure.

‘And think of your daughter,’ I said.

The sobs grew to wails. Behind me I was aware that Miss Brown had come back in from the street and was watching me, arms folded, eyebrows lost in her hair. I drew the door closed so that at least she could not hear me. In the new muffled air of the kiosk, Rosa Aldo’s sobs were louder than ever in my ear.

‘Come home,’ I said. ‘Just come home. This man, whoever he is, who has lured you away, he can’t possibly have honourable intentions. Or a good heart, I have to say. Your husband loves you. Not one woman in a hundred has a husband who loves her so.’ But the more I spoke the harder she cried, until it felt cruel to go on.

‘I go,’ she whispered. ‘Tell Giuseppe,
mi dispiace tanto
.’ And with that the line stopped all its buzzing and the soft, close quiet of the kiosk filled both my ears.

‘She hung up,’ I said, rejoining Alec and Joe on the pavement.

‘She say nothing?’ asked Joe, stricken all anew by this, it seemed. ‘Not one word?’

‘She said, um, “Me dispassy tanto”,’ I repeated, feeling foolish. Joe Aldo let all his breath go at once. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It mean – so very sorry,’ said Joe. ‘She is leave me, for true.’ At this he buried his head in Alec’s shoulder and began to weep, louder and more noisily than his wife even. Alec patted him awkwardly.

‘We’ll find her,’ he said. ‘I’ll get onto the exchange and ask them about the call and we’ll find her.’

I thanked all my stars I was English, turned to Constable Reid in the motorcar and nodded.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. Alec’s case had had its moment of excitement, but now the faceless corpse – Mademoiselle Beauclerc, in all likelihood – was mine again, her identification my problem and her possible murderess my particular responsibility.

Reid nodded back, but did not make any move to step down and open a door for me. Alec had his hands full supporting Joe and so I opened it myself and climbed in.

‘I can explain, Reid,’ I said as we drew away.

‘No need to explain it to me,’ said Reid, swinging the motorcar around and beginning to ascend the hill.

‘She’s an old friend. I’ve known her since she was a child. You understand a protective instinct. I know you do.’

‘Right,’ said Reid. My patience was exhausted.

‘Poor Cissie,’ I said. ‘No man is perfect but a man who pouts and sulks is a fearful drag. I shall tell her so in a spirit of warning when I meet her.’

‘Aye well,’ said Reid. ‘Fine enough. I’m just sayin’.’ Scotch has an inexhaustible supply of quite meaningless little bons mots with which to convey one’s determination to hang onto a huff; Reid seemed to know all of them.

Up at St Columba’s, Saturday afternoon was unfolding in leisurely fashion. The tennis courts were thronged, but for each foursome engaged in patting the ball back and forward, forward and back, sending it sailing over the net into the reach of the waiting racquet, there were at least a dozen lolling on mackintosh squares behind the service lines, chatting desultorily and sipping lemonade. In the rose garden, the girls were soaking up what watery sunshine there was by stretching out on their backs on the wide stone benches and even the narrower terrace balustrades. Their hair fanned out – St Columba’s seemed not to be the firm supporter of pigtails one might look for in a girls’ school – and their arms flopped down, letting their hands graze the ground at their sides. Just for a second that morning’s image swam before my eyes and I shuddered.

‘Aye,’ said Constable Reid. ‘We’ll no’ forget that yet awhile, eh no?’ And, sharing a look, we took the first steps towards cordiality again. ‘Here, youse!’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Mind out and no’ fall off they banisters.’ It was hardly police business, but his hectoring did the trick, rousing all the girls until they were sitting or at least propped up on their elbows, blinking and scowling and no longer looking like corpses, which was fine by me.

‘And . . . put your hats on,’ I chipped in. ‘Or move into the shade before you all end up as brown as ploughmen.’ Reid nodded and we left the garden, to whispers of ‘Gilver’ and ‘French, I think’ and stifled laughter at how old-fashioned I had shown myself to be.

‘So where is she?’ said Reid, when we had slipped in through the open french windows to the empty dining room. He stood sniffing the air, which was still thick from the luncheon-time cabbage and gravy – the poor girls; small wonder they were drowsing like bumblebees – and looked so very efficient and eager that once again I felt an urge to shield Fleur and none at all to deliver her unto him.

‘I’ll take you to her rooms,’ I said, hardly knowing why I gave the little cell this lordly title – more shielding, probably.

The same cold feeling which had descended upon me at the cove was back again, stronger than ever. I wondered if Reid felt anything of the like and I stole glances at him as we crossed the hall and climbed the stairs. He seemed calm enough, grimly confident if anything, but he was a bright lad and surely he must be wondering if we would find her there. I was long past wondering myself; I was sure. We wended through the corridors, past rooms absolutely silent this sunny afternoon, and stopped at Fleur’s door. Constable Reid rapped on the wood with a firm authority that no one inside could have ignored, not for a pension. There was no answer. He tried the handle, found the door unlocked, glanced at me and just as firmly as he had knocked he swung it open.

The room, needless to say, was empty. Reid let his breath go – the first sign that he had been suffering even the smallest measure of tension.

‘Righty-ho,’ he said. ‘So where will she be if she’s no’ in here, then? Classroom? On a Saturday afternoon?’

I shook my head and gazed at the room that lay before me. It had been so bare before that it was hard to account for what made it barer now. Perhaps there had been a book on the beside table; certainly there was none today. And the water glass had been rinsed out and was resting upside down on a folded flannel facecloth by the washbasin. But perhaps Fleur rinsed her glass and moved her Bible every morning. What was it? Then my eye was caught by the dark lines along the front of the little chest and I bit down on my bottom lip. The drawers were not fully closed – the top one open half an inch, the next an inch and the third an inch and a half, so precise and so familiar. It was what Matron in the convalescent home in the war required us to do when one poor soldier had limped off home and the next had not arrived. The drawers were being aired. The drawers were empty.

And what had happened was my fault, entirely mine. I knew it had happened the moment I turned and saw the empty beach behind me, but I had done nothing. Later I would argue that I had tried and the stupid sergeant had stopped me. Later still, I would tell myself that if I knew the sergeant was stupid then it was up to me to ignore him. She could not have gone far; she had only had a five-minute start at most. I should have searched and listened and called her name and – surely – I would have found her. It was too late now.

Fleur was gone.

‘Yep,’ said Constable Reid, slamming shut the wardrobe door which gave an echoing boom. ‘She’s away.’

‘I can furnish you with the address of her family home and those of her sisters and . . .’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Reid, but his tone was not one of huffy offence any more. He stood looking out of the window, tapping a tune with one finger on the hollow of his cheek. ‘Only . . . how come she got packed up and off so quickly?’