Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (19 page)

‘I didn’t mean to suggest high jinks!’ I said. ‘Astronomy, perhaps. Or woodcarving.’

‘Or circus tricks, quite,’ drawled Stella.

‘What kind of circus tricks?’ Sally asked. ‘I’d love to be able to juggle.’

‘Oh, me too,’ said Spring. ‘Or standing up on a horse in a bathing suit. Just to annoy Daddy. He’s still quite keen on side-saddle, Miss Gilver, if you can believe it these days.’

‘Dogs,’ I said, and it was rather difficult to keep mopping up gravy with the last of my Yorkshire pudding while crossing my fingers. ‘I can’t juggle myself but I have a Dalmatian at home who can.’ I warmed to it and uncrossed my fingers. There was a kernel of truth in this. Bunty had never quite forgotten the wonderful things she had learned in her short sojourn at the circus three years before and even my bumbling instead of the expertise of the circus folk could not dislodge it.

‘Golly,’ said Eileen. ‘I wish you’d brought him. What fun.’ I nodded and smiled, knowing that Bunty was safely stuck in Perthshire and my fibs would never come back to haunt me.

The maids appeared then to clear the main course and the girls went through their familiar craning and straining to see what pudding might be, looking quite a bit like liberty horses arching their necks in formation in the ring. I was content with what the luncheon table had given to me and did not need the delights of the pudding. Miss Bell and Miss Taylor had been at Oxford with Miss Fielding. It would be easy, I was sure, to track their movements now, for were not these bluestockings all as thick as thieves and did they not gather together for reunions as regularly as migrating flocks of birds alighting on their oceanic islands?

‘What about bird watching?’ I said, as the thought struck me. ‘I’m rather an ornithologist.’ More lies, but I was thinking, rather desperately, of what might be seen through binoculars. ‘Or does one of the other mistresses already help out there?’

‘Not any more,’ said Sally.

‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I asked, with a leap of hope. For how easy it would be, if one’s attention was trained on a distant speck, to take a fateful step too close to the cliff edge and plunge into the sea.

‘Miss Lipscott,’ said Eileen. ‘Owls.’

‘I thought it was bats,’ said Katie.

‘Making her a chiropterologist,’ said Eileen, ‘and not an ornithologist at all.’

‘Well, it was night anyway,’ said Spring.

‘Twas the nightingale and not the lark,’ said Stella.

‘Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou?’ said Katie in a fluttery voice and all five of them, even the haughty Stella, were soon tittering.

I had meant to ask them to point out Sabbatina Aldo for me, although I could not quite see what reason I could give to allay suspicion about my interest in her, but rolling my eyes at their silliness and looking away to other parts of the room, I thought I had spotted her without assistance. Amongst the third form there was a child with luxurious raven tresses who could not possibly be either an English rose nor a Scotch thistle (as Grant always described her countrywomen, on account of their dry fair hair and their cheeks purple from the cold). Besides her colouring, she was sitting slightly alone although at a table of twelve, looking as diffident in her neatness as a scholarship girl (or the beneficiary of a wealthy patron anyway) would look amongst the Stellas and Springs of this world.

First, though, for the obliging Cissie, who might have seen all manner of going-on on the cliff top last Tuesday evening and might yet have more to tell of Mrs Aldo’s mysterious lover, if one asked the right questions and if one were a kind lady of forty-one instead of a mortifyingly handsome young man.

She was a short and wiry little person, with a slight cast to her left eye and an upper lip larger than the lower one by just about the proportion that a lower lip should be larger than the upper. She was saved, however, by a finely chiselled nose, apple cheeks and a shining cap of bright hair done in the latest style, of which one could see rather a lot owing to the tiny dimensions of her fashionable hat, chosen for the company rather than the setting. All in all, one could see what a young man might find appealing about her, especially since when I discovered her with Reid at the third tee she was gazing at him with slightly cross-eyed but nonetheless heartfelt devotion and hugging his clubs as an obvious substitute for his manly form.

‘Reid,’ I said, nodding. ‘And Cissie.’ She let go of the clubs and bobbed nicely. ‘You’ll just have to slum it for a while,’ I said to the constable. ‘Carry your own clubs – it won’t kill you. Cissie, my dear, I’d like you to come for a little walk with me.’ She looked at Reid for approval and when he gave a short nod – although with not a whisper of good grace about it – she opened her little bag, put on her Sunday gloves and waited expectantly for me to lead her.

‘Now then,’ I said, when we were under way, before remembering the kind lady and hastily parking the schoolmistress-cum-nanny as whom I had begun. ‘That’s a very pretty hat, is it new?’ Cissie nodded and put a hand up to touch it. I wondered if she was still at the age when she would stop walking and bend over her skirts to look at a new pair of shoes she was wearing. ‘So your mistress doesn’t have any silly notions of you dressing plainly even on free afternoons then?’ Cissie very properly said nothing. ‘Only Reid said she was a bit of a tartar.’ Again, Cissie said nothing but she did allow herself a small smile. ‘I’m glad to hear she’s not as unreasonable as all that,’ I said, ‘but I do want to assure you, my dear, that anything you say to me is in the strictest confidence.’

‘I brought it out in ma handbag,’ said Cissie. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about the startling hat, but only another moment to realise that she had shown herself to be my ally.

‘Dear me, how old-fashioned of her,’ I said. ‘Now then,’ – cosily, this time, with nothing of the nanny anywhere – ‘I know because your fiancé told me’ – there was a gasp – ‘oh, yes he told me that too and as I say – strictest confidence – anyway, I know that last Tuesday evening you saw someone on the cliffs at Dunskey Castle. I would like you tell me all about it in your own words.’

‘Rosie the washerwoman, ye mean?’ said Cissie.

‘In your own words,’ I said.

‘Aye, I seen her,’ said Cissie. ‘Walking along the path with a man. So I just ducked in a wee bit behind a bush – gorse it was and right scratchy – so’s she didnae see me. That’s all, madam.’

In story books, witnesses invited to speak in their own words always obligingly rattle on for hours spilling reams of detailed clues and red herrings, so the disappointment was a heavy one. I started the list of questions I had hoped to avoid.

‘You didn’t know the man?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But can you describe him?’

‘He was quite big.’

‘Fat?’

‘Aye, a bit. And tall. Dark too. Well, it was dark, but he didn’t look fair.’

‘Young? Old?’

‘No,’ said Cissie slowly. ‘I wouldnae have said he was young. And he couldnae have been old because of . . .’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I never said this to that other man,’ she whispered and my heart quickened. ‘But he couldnae have been old because of how they were . . . I mean, they were definitely . . . I mean, he wasn’t her uncle.’ My heart slowed again, so suddenly that I felt the slump as a slight dizziness. What an innocent she was, despite the ‘sitting’. Of course, we had guessed at once that the partner of a moonlit walk on the cliffs ‘wasn’t her uncle’.

‘And what exactly makes you say so?’ I asked. ‘What did you see them do?’

‘Do?’ said Cissie, blushing. ‘Nothing. Just the way they were walking along and the way they were talking. Well, the way he was talking to her.’

‘You heard what they were saying?’ I said.

‘I heard them talking,’ Cissie said. ‘I didnae understand it, though.’

‘Hm,’ I said, almost blushing myself at that. ‘Just as well, I daresay. And they passed along and didn’t turn back while you were there? You only saw them once?’

‘Aye,’ said Cissie. ‘And I was watching out for them too – didnae want Rosie to see me.’

‘And so you would have seen anyone else who was about?’ I said.

‘Who?’ she said, glancing at me. ‘Did somebody see Wullie and me?’

‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find out if anyone was around. If you saw or heard anything. Anyone calling out, or any kind of disturbance?’

‘No,’ said Cissie. ‘It was right quiet for such a nice warm night. Sometimes you can see smoke or wee red dots if it’s dark. From folks’ cigarettes that are sittin’ in the dips. But no last Tuesday.’

‘And you heard nothing either?’ She shook her head. ‘And I don’t suppose you were there on Monday and Wednesday.’ Cissie took great offence at this, as though one unchaperoned walk a week was blameless but three would ruin her.

‘I was not, madam,’ she said. ‘And I tell you somethin’ else too. I wish I hadn’t gone the night I did. I’ve had it up to here wi’ all these questions.’

And so since there was really no point in badgering her – she had been at only one of the places on the cliffs where No. 5 might have gone over, and at only one time when it might have happened – I let her go back to the honour of trundling ‘Wullie’s’ golf clubs around all afternoon and turned my own steps to the school.

What I really wanted was to find the mistresses in their staffroom together and in the mood for chatting. How difficult could it be to get them talking about their departed colleagues? How I should love to be able to present Alec, in the morning, with a list of their full names and approximate home addresses. My quick peek around the staffroom door, however, revealed that chamber empty of grate and of armchair again, and my surreptitious pause outside Miss Christopher’s door yielded only the scratch of a pen and the rustle of paper. I abandoned the plan, grabbed a passing child and demanded that she find Betty Alder and send her to my classroom to meet me.

If it were not for my hidden but primary purpose – were I in reality only the new English mistress and not a detective as well, I thought – I should be at a pretty loose end by now and rather disappointed by my welcome. This thought brought another on its heels. What of Miss Glennie, who was not (presumably) sleuthing and skulking like me, but really
had
just joined the happy band of mistresses? What must she make of the utter lack of collegiate chumminess I had found here?

‘Here, little girl,’ I called out to a figure crossing the end of the passageway. To my astonishment, instead of meekly trotting up to see what I wanted, she put on a spurt of speed and disappeared from sight. ‘Hey! Young lady!’ I shouted after her and marched to the corner to find her dragging herself back as though she had weights attached to her ankles.

‘Yes, Miss Gilver?’ she said.

‘That was very naughty of you,’ I scolded. ‘I’m half-inclined to hand out . . .’ My voice trailed off as I realised I did not know whether St Columba’s went in for demerits, detentions or the slipper. ‘Anyway, don’t do it again.’

‘You know what the girls are calling you, don’t you?’ said the child with blithe impertinence.

‘I do,’ I replied. ‘Goody Gilver, but I’m willing to relinquish the honour.’

‘Grabber,’ she said. ‘
Grabber
Gilver. Always collaring us and sending us on errands quite out of our way.’

‘Well, I’m only after information this time, you little scamp,’ I said, secretly quite pleased to have got a nickname already and one I did not make up for myself, not to mention one which made me sound so efficacious as a moderator of youthful indiscipline. I only hoped I was not noticeably beaming. ‘Where is Miss Beauclerc’s old room?’

‘Oh! All right then. It’s up those stairs at the end there and halfway along the land-side passage. Just beyond the horrible picture.’

‘Thank you, peculiar child,’ I said. ‘And run along.’

One could see what she meant, I thought, as I drew even with the painting, in which Ophelia floated rather smugly in what looked like a fishpond; a paean to suicide which surely had no place in a girls’ school. (Although if the artist had painted what a young woman
really
looked like once good and drowned, one would no more have hung the results on the wall.)

Passing by it, I stopped at Miss Glennie’s door, which still bore the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc, and knocked. There was a pause, a scuffle and then a reply.

‘Yes?’

I opened the door and leaned in with a friendly smile arranged on my face.

‘Miss Gilver, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘The other new girl. Just wondering how you’re getting on?’ Then my smile faltered a little. Miss Glennie was getting on, or so it would seem, a lot better than me. She had a pile of jotters on her table and a large dictionary with gold-edged pages open on the floor at her side, and it occurred to me that there might be all manner of things I should have been busy doing yesterday and today.

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Miss Glennie. She did not look fine. She looked as though she had recently had some dreadful shock and was still reeling.

‘Had you far to come?’ I asked her. ‘Shouldn’t you be resting today after your journey?

‘Only Edinburgh,’ she replied. ‘And I’d rather not fall behind.’

‘And you’re new at this schoolmistressing lark, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Miss Shanks said something about your having been a governess before?’

Miss Glennie looked less fine than ever on hearing me mention what I was still sure must be her fictitious royal past.

‘I told the Lambourne Agency only with great reluctance,’ she said, ‘and they promised not to divulge my personal affairs to
anyone
.’

Or rather, I thought drily, she had made up a silly story that she heartily wished would go away and stop following her around.

‘One would think you’d be proud of such a connection,’ I said, smiling, ‘hardly ashamed.’

‘We’re not supposed to talk about it,’ she said miserably. ‘That was always made very clear.’ I nodded but said nothing. Teddy had been a one for tall tales set about by secrets when he was a child (a Foreign Office appointment requiring him to spy on the Germans with a secret radio he was not allowed to show us; this was one notable episode from wartime) but he had been six and Miss Glennie was forty-five if a day. ‘And now, Miss Gilver, I really am grateful but I must get on with all of this. Do you know there’s a girl going up to Edinburgh to read French? But only if she passes her Higher Cert.’ I nodded, but now it occurred to me that I could not remember whether Miss Shanks had said one of the crop of scholars currently incubating in St Columba’s bosom was bound for a degree in
English
. Chemistry she had mentioned, and I rather thought geography and history were the others, but I had not been thinking of English then, during my interregnum as the French mistress. I took my leave and hurried away to Fleur’s classroom, thinking there would be some note of such a scholar in the papers there. It was only when I opened the door and entered that I remembered having summoned Sabbatina Aldo, who was waiting in a desk in the front row and stood politely on seeing me.