Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (27 page)

‘Might
not
be the first one,’ I reminded him.

‘How dare you!’ said Aurora. Her voice was trembling with suppressed emotion. ‘We sacked you. You have no right to be asking these beastly questions.’

‘I’ll speak to her,’ I said.

‘Who are you talking to on that thing, anyway?’ Aurora said.

‘It’s Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘Would you like a word?’

‘She was our
friend
,’ Aurora said, sounding tearful now.

‘She still is,’ said Alec. ‘And so am I. We’re both trying to help.’

‘Get out,’ said Aurora. I could hear the muddled sounds of movement. ‘Get out of this house and don’t ever come back.’

‘You can’t throw me out onto the moor in the dead of night,’ said Alec. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! What will your husband say? I mean, I take it he knows nothing of this latest death?’

‘Shut
up
,’ said Aurora, collapsing into sobs. ‘And get out. My husband . . . My husband will chase you off with a shotgun if I tell him how you tricked us all.’ Alec came back to the mouthpiece and sighed down the line.

‘I’m not sure I believe her, Dan, but I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at the Horseshoe in Egton if you need me.’ He laid the earpiece down, without hanging up, and I could hear more movement and then silence. I waited. After a moment there were some swishing noises as someone moved closer and then Aurora’s voice came down the line.

‘Is anyone there?’

‘It’s me, darling,’ I said. ‘Alec told you.’

‘That was a rotten trick to play,’ she said. ‘Fenella doesn’t know who she’s talking to these days. What did she tell him?’

‘About Elf’s death, and about his predecessor.’

‘Oh, Dandy, it’s not how it seems, please believe me. Poor Elf and poor Charles and poor, poor darling Fleur. It’s not at all the way it must sound. And she’s been absolutely wonderful for years and years now.’

‘Yes, eight years is a good stretch,’ I said. ‘It held until last Tuesday or Wednesday and now there’s another corpse and Fleur’s disappeared again. Where’s this nursing home she usually goes to? Have you bundled her off there for a third time?’

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ said Aurora. ‘We don’t know
where
she is. You’ve no idea, Dandy, what we go through when we don’t know where she is, Mamma, Pearl and me.’

‘The truth will out, Aurora my dear,’ I said. To my surprise she snorted.

‘Hark at you, talking about “truth” like that,’ she said, ‘when both of you are just as twisty as corkscrews. I don’t think for a minute that you want to look after Fleur, any more than I believe Mr Osborne just happened to run out of petrol right by our front gate
or
that his wife killed herself jumping off a cliff. Why ever in the world he’s sent his daughter to school all the way up here, it wasn’t for that.’

I did not correct her. She would only have felt foolish and got even more angry. Instead, I rang off and immediately asked the exchange to put me through to the telegraph office.

‘“Name was Charles. Stop. Shiny Button told me. Stop,”’ said the operator. ‘Have I got that right?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Osborne at the Horseshoe Inn, Egton Bridge, Yorkshire, please.’

Surely there cannot have been too many young men called Charles who had died in crashes in 1919, I thought, hanging up again. In fact, I almost fancied there was a faint memory stirring in me at the thought of it. Alec would be able to turn up something in the morning if he could get to a newspaper office or a library somewhere.

As for me, I had go to Paterson’s farm again and take Miss Beauclerc her things. Then, I supposed, I should have to forewarn Hugh of her arrival. In fact – I looked at the telephone sitting there on Ivy Shanks’s desk – since I was right here . . .

‘Gilverton, Perthshire,’ I said to the woman on the exchange and then, ‘It’s me, Pallister,’ when the telephone was answered. I could picture him standing in the passageway just our side of the green baize door and glaring down his nose at the mouthpiece. Pallister does not approve of telephones, or of his mistress, either, these days.

‘Madam,’ he replied.

‘Is my husband there?’

‘Of course, madam,’ he said with affected surprise (the point being that decent people were
all
blamelessly at home, and only the very depraved were ringing from goodness knows where). ‘I shall alert Master and have him pick up the telephone in the billiards room.’

‘Who’s there?’ I asked Hugh when he answered a few minutes later, for he never practises billiards alone and so is only ever in the room when there is someone to challenge to a game or two.

‘Ah, Donald,’ he said.

I sat up very straight, very fast, in Miss Shanks’s chair, causing it to catch me in the small of the back as it tipped forward.

‘Good God, he’s been expelled!’ I said. ‘What for? What did he do?’

‘Marvellous that you have such faith in the boy, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘He has a weekend pass for the half-holiday and decided to come home.’

‘Right,’ I said. I had forgotten it was half-term time even as the rumblings about Parents’ Day at St Columba’s reminded me. ‘He’ll spend it all on trains but for a day,’ I went on, blustering a little from shame over my outburst. ‘What about Teddy?’

‘Thankfully he’s been invited out with a friend,’ said Hugh. ‘Sewell. So you have no reason to be feeling guilty.’

I had not been, to be honest, and resented the veiled implication that I should. All the same I would send a letter and a ten shilling note to the Sewells; I knew that Teddy would rather have a tip than a visit from me any day.

‘Now then, Hugh,’ I said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘I should say you do,’ said Hugh very drily. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand but I could still hear him talking to Donald. ‘Could you run along and fetch my diary from my business room desk, old chap? Thank you.’ I rolled my eyes; Hugh only old chaps the boys when he is trying (sometimes quite ostentatiously) to look like the perfect parent in comparison with me. ‘I’ve had the most extraordinary letter, Dandy.’

‘Who from?’ I asked.

‘From whom is a question I cannot answer,’ Hugh said. I did not miss the little dig at my grammar, but I rose above it.

‘Illegible signature?’

‘Anonymous,’ said Hugh. ‘Asked me to reply by return to a poste restante. Like a penny dreadful.’

‘What does it say?’

‘It tells me nothing I did not already know,’ he replied. ‘That you are living there (Portpatrick, one surmises) with a man who is not me and passing yourself off as—’

‘I am not!’ I said. ‘We stayed in the same pub in separate rooms for one night and since then I’ve been living at the girls’ school.’

‘Passing yourself off as a schoolmistress,’ he finished. ‘
Miss
Gilver.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘I know exactly who sent it. “Here” is the Crown and it was written by a very nosy and thoroughly unpleasant woman who’s holidaying there also with her companion. She witnessed Alec and me doing such shocking things as eating breakfast and standing on the street talking. Throw it on the fire, Hugh, and forget about it.’

‘I threw it on the fire within a minute of opening it,’ Hugh said. ‘Revolting thing.’

‘And it’s nothing to do with what I have to tell you anyway. The thing is, you see, that someone is coming to stay. At Gilverton. Probably tomorrow.’

‘Someone we know?’ said Hugh. There was an ominous note in his voice which I ignored.

‘No, a stranger,’ I said. ‘A Frenchwoman by the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc. One of the Dauphiné Beauclercs.’

‘The who?’

‘She’s actually been working as a French mistress here at St Columba’s.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh Hugh – the school where I’m working on the case. You never listen.’

‘Convent school, is it?’ said Hugh, the mention of a saint clearly setting all sorts of alarm bells ringing.

‘Perfectly ordinary girls’ school, chapel is the local kirk,’ I said. ‘In fact Basil Rowe-Issing’s girl is here. And one of the Norton daughters too. I had her reading Macbeth this morning. Anyway, I
had
thought Mademoiselle Beauclerc could have a bed in the servants’ wing and help Grant but those attic rooms are horribly draughty. She could always go to Dunelgar instead. Or she could go to Benachally and look at the hangings. She said she could embroider like anything.’

‘And is she in hiding from the police, might one ask?’ said Hugh. ‘Or is there more likely to be a ne’er-do-well hot-footing it after her?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘She needs somewhere to be, out of the way, while matters settle.’

‘While matters settle,’ he repeated. ‘Very well, Dandy. Tell me when she’s arriving and I’ll send the car. If some old French nun can fix those hangings without it costing us, I should be perfectly happy to put her up for a while.’

‘It’s not a convent,’ I said again. ‘And I’ve never asked but judging by appearance I’d say Mademoiselle was about twenty-five.’

There was a short silence, whose source and whose journey I could not fathom.

‘She’ll be able to walk from the station then,’ said Hugh.

I did not answer for I was thinking not about Jeanne Beauclerc walking from the station but about me trying to find the farm track again; thick clouds had turned this May evening as dark as December and the wind was blowing hard. On the other hand, I could hardly leave her thinking she had been abandoned a second time. On a third hand, my luck in being left alone to make these telephone calls was surely running out by now. ‘Can I ask you a favour, Hugh?’ I said at last.

‘You may,’ Hugh said, annoyingly.

‘Could you ring her up and tell her she can’t have her luggage tonight? It’s the wilds of nowhere where she’s staying, and Alec’s away. If you could just ring up Paterson of Low Merrick Farm, Portpatrick and tell Mademoiselle Beauclerc that I’ll bring her bags before breakfast tomorrow and that she should get herself to the station and take the train to Dunkeld—’

‘Why don’t you just take her stuff to the station?’ interrupted Hugh.

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Thank you, dear.’

‘Seems like the obvious thing to me,’ he said, milking his little triumph now. ‘My goodness, Dandy, if that’s an example of your canny detective’s brain at work! I daresay the whole puzzle isn’t really all that puzzling at all if you had a methodical mind tackling it.’

‘You don’t know the first thing about the case!’ I said.

‘Precisely my point,’ said Hugh.

‘There have been five murders,’ I said.

‘Since Friday?’ He sounded suitably astonished.

‘No, one last Tuesday or Wednesday and two more in the preceding decade.’

‘That’s not five, my dear Dandy,’ he said.

‘And there are five missing persons,’ I said, flushing but ignoring him. ‘Well, actually we’ve found two. But lost another one. And actually another. Yes, five.’

‘Perhaps I should come down there and sort it all out for you,’ he said, in a condescending tone that made me wish he
were
there so I could kick him.

Finally, I settled the telephone back in its cradle for the night and rubbed my ear hard with the heel of my hand. Then I twirled Miss Shanks’s chair back around to its usual setting and stood to leave.

Coming round the desk, though, I spied something upon the carpet just inside the door which certainly had not been there when I had entered and sat down.

A note, a folded piece of lined paper torn from a jotter. Written in pencil on its outside:
Miss
. Now, obviously Miss was Miss Shanks, for this was her office; and just as obviously there was no justification in the world for looking at a letter – even one not inside an envelope – addressed, however cryptically, to another person. (Indeed it had been one of the lessons most fiercely drummed into me by my mother and Nanny Palmer, working for once in tandem, that personal letters never
were
sealed into their envelopes. I had thought as a child that that was to show how much one trusted one’s servants and the Post Office employees and the servants of whoever one was writing to. It was only later that I twigged: one never sealed a letter for to do so was to imply that there were matters in one’s life unsuitable to be known by all.)

Be that as it may, I unfolded the sheet and read it quickly. Ivy Shanks’s life certainly had matters unsuitable to know and that was precisely the reason I wanted to know them.

Of course, it was a bitter disappointment.

I would like leave to go home tomorrow on a visit, please
, it said.
I am very unhappy and need to see my father
. Poor little mite, I thought as I read the signature.
Betty Alder
.

A poor little mite indeed. I refolded the paper and let it fall for Miss Shanks to find when she returned.

Walking along the passages to the staffroom, though, I could not get the girl out of my mind. Part of it was worry about Donald, I supposed, in a funny sort of way, for there was something behind his sudden decision to trawl all the way home and all the way back again. I only hoped that he had not made the journey hoping for my ear and shoulder only to find himself stuck with Hugh and unable to get away again. Donald was never one to hurt our feelings and was always confident that we both – even Hugh – had them.

There was so much sorrow in that little letter. I could not leave the child to the sympathy of Miss Shanks, who had been cold even in referring to her and could not be expected to be warm when faced with her asking for dispensation. I put my head around the staffroom door, meaning to tell Miss Shanks that her room was her own again. She was not there and that decided me. Sabbatina Aldo needed comfort and needed it now. If Miss Shanks had gone to bed she would not see the note until the morning.

But how to find her?

‘Mrs Brown?’ I said. That lady was sitting planted four square in her tub chair by the sideboard. She looked up from her knitting and regarded me with some surprise. ‘Do you have a room list of the girls?’ She frowned. ‘At least that’s what they called it when I was at school. A chart of who’s where with all their names. It’s the names I want really, not the places, but I thought that would be where they were all written.’