Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (23 page)

‘Well, I’d better get back to my girls,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the papers. I assure you I’ll keep them very safe and return them very soon.’

‘Och, hang on to them if it’ll help,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I’m sure I can trust you with a wee question paper or two, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me quite the most twinkling, glittering look I had yet seen from amongst her collection. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the fifth form – I want you to keep an eye on Clothilde Simmons. She seems a very bright girl. Might be worth some extra tutoring.’

‘Has she just joined the school?’ I said, puzzled as to how a girl could have reached the fifth form and only now be tapped as a scholar.

‘No, she’s been with us since she was an eleven-year-old with scraped knees and a lollipop,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘She’s been hiding her light under a bushel, that’s all. Naughty child!’

When I took in the jotters at the end of the hour I paid particular note to that of Clothilde Simmons, but could not see in the laboured and much rubbed-out and rewritten translation – all fifteen lines of it, since Clothilde was one of the handful who did not make it through to the end – any particular glow of brilliance. And leafing back through the pages that Fleur had marked I saw a great deal of red pencil and a progression of solid Bs and Cs. Perhaps she was a whizz at chemistry or something quite removed from English literature, hence Miss Shanks’s prod about the coaching to round her out and tempt a university to give her a place there.

Piers Plowman
, happily, was the low tide of that long first day. After lunch the lower sixth took to
Macbeth
with an almost unseemly relish, begging and pleading to be the witches, auditioning from their seats with much cackling and hunching of their lithe young forms into the twisted shapes of crones over a cauldron. Needless to say,
Rob Roy
was greeted by the second form like the Young Pretender arriving from across the sea: one girl threw
Silas Marner
into the air and shouted hurrah at the news that she need not read another word of it, and only the fact that she caught the book again, firmly, by its cloth covers and did not so much as crease a page saved me from delivering a lecture about the sanctity of the printed word in general and school property in particular.

Still, by the time three o’clock came – for such was the surprisingly early hour at which the St Columba’s girls broke off from their short day of study and flooded back out into the grounds to take up their extra-curricular lolling – my head was awash with new names and old stories and my ears rang with piping voices clamouring ‘Miss Gilver, Miss Gilver’ so that the only thing for it was to take myself off all alone into the sea air and try to walk myself back to my own quiet thoughts and some semblance of tranquillity.

Besides, I had still not seen the cliff top along which Rosa Aldo, her fancy man, Cissie and Willie all had strolled on that fateful evening and from which Constable Reid was so sure No. 5 had tumbled, the cliff top which also led to Low Merrick Farm and the inhospitable farmer’s wife who lived there. I was not sure I could summon the courage to follow Alec up its drive – for I, unlike him, could not vault a gate at a pinch – nor was I so conceited as to think I might find a clue at the castle that others had missed, but I could not help looking carefully at my feet and around the gorse and grass as I went along, with the ruin in view and the sound of the wheeling gulls replacing the girls’ voices with their even more insistent cries.

Of course, there was nothing to be found: cigarette ends and flattened places in what Cissie had called ‘the dips’, corroborating her tale of courting couples holing up there; a few scuffed patches at the edge of the path which might have been places where someone lost her footing and fell, but might have been a hundred other things besides, and all more likely. There were no broken gorse branches where a murderer might have crouched, uncomfortably but discreetly, until a victim appeared; and there was nothing of any interest stashed anywhere either, just endless discarded sweet wrappers and matches, orange peels and apple cores as well as the grubby flags of wool which accumulate wherever sheep and gorse share a breezy headland and the equal weight (it always seems to me) of string and twine and sacking which farmers shed like snake skins in the course of their day.

At Dunskey Castle, I sheltered from the wind long enough to add my budget of match and cigarette end to the trove and then contemplated the journey back again. As is so often the case (but not often enough to inure one to the shock of it), turning around and facing the other way put the sun painfully in my eyes instead of comfortingly at my back. It set the wind against me too, making my nose run and my eyes water; gusting behind me, it had seemed a pleasant helping hand, urging me along. I sniffed, pulled my hat down harder over my forehead and looked about myself. There was Low Merrick Farm, a few fields over, just beyond a little railway bridge, and I knew that where there is a railway bridge (not to mention a farm) there must be a road. I had no desire, anyway, to scramble back over the tracks as I had had to do on my outward journey; although the trains, as Alec attested, were slow and few, the average passenger’s wishes regarding speed and frequency are not those of a trespasser upon the lines and Hugh would never forgive me for being killed in such an unnecessary and bothersome (to the railway company) fashion. His sympathies whenever he heard of a body – be it human or bovine – falling onto a line were always firmly with the upset driver and delayed travellers, and there was nothing to spare for the flattened departed.

On the other hand, I had no particular desire to encounter the pack of ravening collies, but the prospect which
did
entice me was that of announcing to Alec that I had done so. I suppose, too, that a small part of me did not quite believe the tale of the mysterious arm and hand and the advance of the beasts. It sounded quite unlike sheepdogs, farmers’ wives and in particular anyone who offered home cooking to paying guests.

I was decided, and set off across the sheep-cropped turf to the first of the gates with a swing in my step which belied the way my heart was thudding.

The first of the gates had latches and hinges, despite its share of barbed wire, and the second had hinges and not too nasty a knot holding it closed, so I made it to the last one without having to climb or wriggle. This, however, was a beast of a thing, tied in three places with baling twine and leaning into the field at an alarming angle. I studied it. And while I stood there, I saw something move from the corner of my eye. A dark figure was flitting up the farmhouse garden, racing towards the house. It disappeared around the corner leading to the yard and I heard a door bang. Sure that I was safe from the dogs, for no farmer’s wife alive would let them into her garden, I squeezed through the gap between the gatepost and the wall and crept closer. She had been hanging out washing; a basket of linen sat in the middle of the patch of grass and a pair of underdrawers hung by one leg where she had abandoned them. Rather a splendid garment for a sheep farmer’s wife, I thought, studying the satin waist-tape and the lace trim. And next to them on the line . . . I blinked.

‘Never,’ I said out loud. ‘Preposterous.’

For next along the clothes line to the splendid underdrawers was a bandeau brassiere in the same white linen with straps of the same satin tape and no Scottish farmer’s wife from Gretna Green to John o’ Groats could possibly possess such a thing. Not only was it a bandeau instead of a chemise, but a bandeau of a texture and outline that was positively . . .

‘Parisian,’ I said, and I was over the wall and round the corner before any thought of a collie with ice-pick teeth could stop me.

‘Mademoiselle Beauclerc?’ I called out, banging on the door she must have gone through. ‘
Est-ce que vous êtes Mademoiselle Jeanne Beauclerc, la maîtresse?
’ There was only silence. ‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I called out again in an even louder voice, and this time I tried the handle. I heard the creak of a floorboard first and then saw a shadow behind the muslin of an open upstairs window.

‘Who is this, please?’ said a timid voice.

‘A friend,’ I said. ‘An old friend of Fleur Lipscott and a friend of yours, too, if I can be of any assistance.’

The shadow moved again and at last she came into plain view, a pale young woman dressed in black.

‘You came over the fields?’ she said.

‘From the headlands, yes,’ I answered. ‘Miss Beauclerc,
is
it you?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And you say Fleur sent you?’

‘Perhaps you could come down,’ I said. ‘Or could I come in? I feel a bit like Romeo calling up to your window like this. It never seemed to me to be conducive to a proper discussion.’

She moved away from the window and from deep inside the house – Scotch farmhouses are extremely solid – I could hear the faint sounds of movement, receding along an upstairs passage, advancing down a staircase and then approaching a door near where I was standing. Bolts were drawn, keys turned and at last it opened.

‘Where is it?’ said Jeanne Beauclerc, looking past me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Didn’t you bring my luggage? Is Fleur bringing it? Are you coming too?’

‘If I could just come in,’ I said again and she drew back against the passage wall to let me enter. At the end of the passage, facing the sea view, was a sitting room of comfortable armchairs, reading lamps and low tables and from the walking guides, touring maps and picture magazines fanned out upon these tables I quickly surmised that this was the residents’ lounge for Low Merrick’s paying guests.

‘So,’ I said, perching on the arm of a chair, ‘when you left St Columba’s last week you came here?’

‘And Fleur was supposed to pack a few things for me,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘If she could get away. But here I am with one change of linen and my toothbrush waiting and waiting and you haven’t brought so much as a spare nightgown. And I can’t stay here much longer.’

‘Why not?’ I said, puzzled by her air of grievance. Surely she did not mean to suggest that she was above the simple comforts of this pleasant farmhouse. ‘Paying guests are quite the norm here, aren’t they?’

She frowned and shook her hair back. She wore it in long loose curls, like a child.

‘Mrs Paterson tells me she needs my room at the end of the week, for Parents’ Day at the school. And they do not like keeping it secret that I am here. I shall not be sorry to go.’

‘Why did you come here?’ I said.

‘We chose this place because it was right on the other side of the town from Miss Shanks but near enough to walk to, and very quiet. Hah! Quiet! First came the police and then a very strange young man – but I got rid of him.’

‘I heard,’ I said drily. ‘Where are the dogs today?’

She ignored the question and the reprimand, although she had the good grace to blush a little.

‘And now you!’ she cried. ‘What is happening?’

‘Might one ask why you and Fleur were running away?’ I said. ‘In the middle of term, like two schoolgirls instead of two mistresses?’

‘Hasn’t Fleur told you?’ said Miss Beauclerc, warily.

‘Fleur, I’m afraid to relate, is gone,’ I said. ‘She left on Saturday.’

Miss Beauclerc was silent for a full minute, the blood draining from her face and her eyes widening and widening until I could see the whites all around. When she spoke again her voice was ragged.

‘She left without me? She took her things and sailed away? Without me?’

‘Sailed?’ I echoed.

‘
Oui
,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘This was our plan. We were to hire a little boat on Saturday, smuggle our things into it overnight – pretend to be ill and miss church if we needed more time – and set sail tonight on the tide. We even thought we might throw some of our clothes over the side to wash up and maybe people would think we had drowned and never look for us.’

‘A boat,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ The police had asked about trains and ferries and taxis, had even asked fishermen if they had had a passenger. They had dragged their minds into the twentieth century enough to ask at the garage if a young lady had hired a motorcar but it had never occurred to them to think that Fleur might have hoisted the mainsail of a little boat and taken herself away across the sea.

The worst of it was that, while one could forgive
them
– the police force of a small and traditional town where such modernity was unknown – I did not know how I was ever to forgive myself. I, who knew all too well of Fleur’s love of boats and the sea, who had watched her playing at sailing ships in the lake and had read in Pearl’s letters through the years that followed all about how marvellous Fleur had been crewing for this or that friend in some race or other. Even that summer when she was a baby of seven she had sat imperiously on her sandcastle that day at Watchet, a chicken leg in one hand and a spyglass in the other, watching the yachts out in the bay and regaling us all in her precocious way with where each crew had got its trim wrong and how differently she would have managed things if she were the skipper.

‘I’d have shaved a good few minutes off that blue one’s time, I can tell you,’ she had said, taking her glass away from her eye and trying to spit out the mouthful of hair that had blown in before she took another bite of chicken. ‘They don’t have the first idea what she can do.’ She tore a strip of chicken meat away from the bone with her teeth and put the glass back to her eye. ‘A waste of a good wind, if you ask me.’

For the rest of the day, Aurora and Pearl took to calling her ‘Cap’n Bligh’ until Fleur pointed out with great dignity that Captain Bligh was a naval officer who would not have known a tiller from a teapot, and if they had to call her something of the like she thought Francis Drake was more of a sailor any day.

‘Why did she go without me?’ said Miss Beauclerc, bringing me out of my memories. ‘And what am I to do now?’

‘Well, if we’re picking things over,’ I said, ‘why did you leave early and come to the Patersons’? If you were all set for today why did you bolt a week early?’