Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (18 page)

‘So there’s nae use gettin’ a third opinion then?’ said Reid. ‘If they’re all as bad as each other.’

‘I’d trust one of the girls,’ I said, ‘but we couldn’t possibly ask it of them. No, I think we just have to try to track down Miss Beauclerc and if we fail to . . . then track down her family and . . . no distinguishing marks at all, Constable? Moles, scars, birthmarks?’ Reid, brick-red in the face once more, simply shook his head. ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘When can I speak to Cissie?’

‘We’re all quits, aren’t we?’ said Reid, rather wary. ‘The police are no’ botherin’ your friend and so you’re no’ tryin’ to set Cissie against me, eh no? Aye, well come and meet us on the links this afternoon then. After three. It’s right behind the school. You can’t miss it.’

‘She’s a golfer too?’ I said. This was surprising in a parlour maid, to my mind.

‘Naw,’ said Reid, blushing a little again. ‘She’s . . . she just, if I’m playin’ a round she . . .’

‘You’re not trying to say she
caddies
for you?’ said Alec.

‘She lugs your clubs around on her afternoon free?’ I said.

‘Naw!’ said Reid. ‘They’re on a wee set o’ trolley wheels. She just pulls them along.’

He retired with a great air of wounded dignity, leaving Alec and me to burst into laughter behind him, like a pair of schoolgirls when a mistress leaves the room.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘This Cissie must be a bit of limp rag.’

‘She seemed lively enough to me,’ Alec said. ‘Perhaps PC Reid has hidden charms. Now, to the part we couldn’t discuss in front of him.’

‘Elf,’ I said. ‘Where does one begin?’

‘With the newspapers of the day and the report of the inquest, I suppose,’ Alec said.

‘But those will only tell you what I’ve told you anyway.’

‘Oh quite, quite, but I was thinking more of gathering names of individuals one might talk to. I still think that’s a better use of my time than haring after Miss Blair in that unlikely way. Either that, or asking around for anyone who might have seen our corpse when she was alive. Under cover of tracing Mrs Aldo, you know. For today at least, since it’s Sunday and I can’t start pestering librarians
or
teachers’ employment agencies until tomorrow.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said reluctantly. ‘And I could try to think of a way to dig some more without arousing suspicions. If only they hadn’t met me already I could present myself as an inveterate nosy-parker and they’d think nothing of my questions.’

‘Ask the girls,’ said Alec. ‘No one so self-centred as the young. They’ll think nothing at all.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘And I need to establish Fleur’s movements during the time our corpse might have died anyway. I hate having to call her “our corpse”. Can’t we think of something less grisly?’

‘Why don’t we call her No. 5?’ suggested Alec. I stared at him, disbelieving, for what could possibly be more grisly than that?

‘I’ll start with Sabbatina Aldo,’ I said, pulling on my gloves and preparing myself for departure. ‘You never know – she might be able to tell us something about her mother’s movements too.’

‘Onwards, then,’ said Alec, rising as I did.

‘And most certainly upwards,’ I replied, thinking of the cliff steps to St Columba’s, which were not getting any less steep and arduous for the number of times I had climbed them.

It was a pleasant prospect, however, the gusting clouds and the sparkling sea, and I noticed for the first time the golf links on the headland behind the school, where the pancake caps of the men could be seen sprouting on the greens and fairways like mushrooms. I saw, too, a fair few splashes of custard yellow: St Columba’s girls in their shirtsleeves, getting in a round before luncheon on this unusually mild day.

The entrance hall was deserted and the corridors silent, only the good rich smell of roasting beef wafting up from the kitchens to say that anyone was at work inside these walls, so instead of trying to find the needle of Sabbatina Aldo in the haystack of girls around the pool and courts and grounds I set off for Fleur’s classroom – Miss Shanks had given me sketchy directions the evening before – in slim hopes of some letters or papers she might have left behind and in rather plumper dread of what reins, besides Milton, I might discover I had to take up when the following school day dawned.

Her classroom was on the seaward side, long and sunny, with high glittering windows, white-distempered walls and broad black floorboards, surely as Spartan as even the tenant of Fleur’s monastic sleeping cell could desire. There was not a picture, nor a bookshelf, nor the lowliest pot of daisies on the mustard-painted fireplace, just six rows of forms facing a large desk set up on a small dais, with a blackboard behind.

I sat in Fleur’s chair and opened the top of the three desk drawers, finding in there such tidiness and order that my hopes, slender as they had been, dwindled to threads and blew away. Pens and ink, a wiper, fresh sheets for the blotter, a red pencil and its little box sharpener, a cloth-covered block for cleaning the board and a packet of white chalk. In short, nothing.

In the second drawer, however, there was something indeed. I drew it all out and spread it on the desktop, letting my horrified eyes rest on each item in turn until I had been round them all.

Milton, to my creeping dismay, was not the half of it. The lower sixth were engaged, granted, on studying Shakespeare (as Miss Shanks had so airily suggested all her girls might be) but no frothy comedy or worthy history for them!
King Lear
was the order of the day. Fleur’s copy had girls’ names pasted over the list of dramatis personae, which I took to indicate that it was being read aloud in the classroom, but there were also some beastly comprehension questions scrawled on slips of paper and tucked into the pages here and there.

I turned, faintly, from the long, frantic speech towards the end of Act IV where the volume had fallen open and gave my attention to the books upon which Fleur had decided the budding minds of the middle forms should grow rich and be enlightened.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, Piers Plowman
and
The Canterbury Tales
glared balefully up at me from the desktop and my heart sank deep down into me like a pebble lobbed into a well. The poor girls! I had slogged through
The Pilgrim’s Progress
myself as a small child, weeping with boredom and hating Christian like poison, but those were the times and that was the excuse for it. These days there could surely be none. As for
The Canterbury Tales
and
Piers Plowman
, I had managed to stagger thus far through my life without knowledge of a single line of either and, leafing through a little of each, was only sorry that my run of luck had ended. John Donne for the lower fourth seemed a bright spot until I cast my eyes over Fleur’s notes and saw that, of all his works, she had selected the Holy Sonnets, which was tiresomeness beyond imagining.

The first and second forms, in their tender years, had been spared maddened kings, pious allegories and epic poetry and were allotted instead novels, and nineteenth-century novels at that, but of all the wondrous outpourings of that miraculous age Fleur had plumped – as though to quell any danger of enjoyment – for
The Water Babies
and
Silas Marner
.

‘
Silas Marner
?’ I muttered, remembering how I had snorted with impatience at the tiresome old fool and his sickening little darling. I closed it and pinched the pages between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Well, at least it’s short.’
The Water Babies
I had, admittedly, loved when I was too young to know better but when I unearthed it to read to my sons in their nursery, I had very soon re-earthed it again, deep into a trunk in an attic, aghast at its feverish insistence on death and sacrifice and its unwholesome obsession with staying pure and clean (and with fish, one has to say). Mr Kingsley would have given those Austrian doctors a good gallop round the paddock if he had ever submitted to them, I remember thinking.

And so this was what little Fleur Lipscott had picked to share with the poor unfortunate girls. I could hardly believe it. Where was Robinson Crusoe? Where Gulliver? Where Oliver and Pip and Alice and Cathy and all her friends from childhood? For Fleur had spent all day every rainy day – and portions even of fine ones – holed up in a loft with a bag of toffees, and I recalled her emerging with shining eyes and demanding paper and pens and solitude while she began her Great Novel.

‘With islands and pirates and pickpockets and a raging fire and orphans and a stolen inheritance and a wedding,’ she had announced to us all. ‘And a ghost. Don’t disturb me until it’s done.’

I cast my eyes over the seven volumes before me on the desk, doubting whether there was a single pirate amongst the lot of them, and went on a treasure hunt for what I was sure must exist somewhere.

I was right: in the big cupboard built into the corner of the room, where exercise books and bottles of ink were stored (and also, I noticed, a large trunk full of veils and swords and the like to help with the acting out of the plays), there was a bookcase, and upon that bookcase by the mercy of Providence were still ranged the books which had held sway in the English classroom of St Columba’s before the strange Miss Lipscott had swept them away.

A very happy twenty minutes later I had made my selections. The little ones were to have
Kidnapped
, the second form
Rob Roy
, the third form (who deserved the most pity of all after
The Canterbury Tales
) were to be rewarded with
Tam o’Shanter
. The lower fourth were going to see a side of Donne at which his Holy Sonnets had not hinted, although I would avoid the farthest reaches: they were fifteen, after all, not forty. The fifth had to stick with
Piers Plowman
for their exam but I would intersperse it with
Jane Eyre
as a corrective. The lower sixth, I decided, could leave King Lear out on the moor to take his chances and turn to the rather more thrilling adventures of Macbeth instead and, to soothe the troubled brains of the upper sixth, busy cramming
Paradise Lost
, I would require them to read one each day of Shakespeare’s sonnets starting with ‘O, never say that I was false of heart’, Sonnet 109, which was my favourite. (Already I could tell that the power of being the schoolmistress, with the key to the cupboard where the books were kept, was going to my head and threatening to ruin me.)

At luncheon, where the roast beef fulfilled every bit of its fragrant promise, although one could have played deck quoits with the Yorkshire puddings (for no doubt the cook was a Scotchwoman and it will out somewhere), I slipped the tiniest little border trowel into the palm of my hand and did as minute and discreet a portion of digging as could properly be called digging at all.

‘What of your extra-curricular hours, girls?’ I said. ‘I’m very happy to take over Miss Lipscott’s duties there.’

‘Cramming,’ said Katie.

‘Yes, stuffing
Paradise
down our gullets like pelicans with herrings,’ said Spring. She had taken the news that it was too late to change the examination paper very badly.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, poor dears. I remember it well.’ This was a lie, of course; I had never sat an examination in my life unless one could count the beady-eyed way I was watched making introductions at finishing-school sherry parties (and in all honesty one could not). ‘But the other forms? Do you happen to know? Did Miss Lipscott have a weekly round?’ Five pairs of eyes gazed back at me, with varying expressions of interest and disdain, but none with comprehension. ‘Sewing Club on a Monday, Rambling Club on a Tuesday, Country Dancing on a Wednesday, that sort of thing . . .?’ I had put the notion of rambling on a Tuesday into the list with great care.

‘Oh no, the mistresses don’t concern themselves much with our Societies,’ said Sally. ‘Too busy marking.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And what Societies are there?’

‘Well, not sewing, thank goodness,’ said Stella. ‘And not country dancing – what a thought.’

‘We used to have all sorts of dancing but there’s none now,’ said Sally.

‘Miss Lovage does teach
Dance
,’ said Eileen. ‘But
Dance
isn’t dancing, really.’ Spring and Katie began to giggle.

‘Imagine going to a party and doing Miss Lovage’s
Dance
!’

‘Imagine at our coming-out balls. If we did
Dance
!’

‘We’d be taken to a sanatorium and tied to our beds with stout rope.’

‘Now, now,’ I said, although my lips were twitching. ‘And what about rambling? One would have thought with these lovely cliff walks and the ruined castles and all . . .’

‘I think some of the younger girls tramp about a bit,’ said Stella. ‘Especially the Scotch ones.’

‘It’s on Sunday afternoons,’ said Eileen. ‘Quite fun, actually. We – they, I mean – they take nature sheets and try to collect things. Almost like a treasure hunt, you see?’

‘Sunday afternoons,’ I said. ‘Right-ho.’ There was no chance that No. 5 had been in the water six days so, no matter how many girls had been tramping about the cliffs with nature sheets at the last ramblers’ outing, they could not have seen anything useful to me. I tried another tack. ‘I didn’t realise that the art mistress might teach dancing too,’ I said.

‘Not dancing, Miss Gilver,’ said Katie. ‘
Daahhhnce
!’ The giggles started to break out once more and I did not have to summon any schoolmistressishness to start tutting.

‘You’re all very silly for such great big girls,’ I said. ‘I could excuse it in the little ones. What of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell? Had they other strings to their bow? I’m afraid I shall only be teaching English to you. Although I do have some circus training, I suppose.’ Thus I attempted to ingratiate and glamorise myself with them, and certainly I loosened their tongues.

‘Tinker Bell and The Maid were scholars, Miss Gilver,’ said Spring.

‘The Maid?’ I said.

‘Of Orleans,’ said Katie. ‘History mistress, you see?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And so Juliet for Miss Lipscott, because of Shakespeare?’

‘Scholars,’ went on Spring without answering my interruption, ‘dry, dusty and devoted. No time for anything else. They and Miss Fielding were all at Somerville together – pioneers of the day – and we always thought – that is, Mummy always told me – that they had to be whiter than white. No high jinks or they’d be out on their ear.’