Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (28 page)

‘Don’t you have class lists?’ said Mrs Brown. She, Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher were all looking at me very oddly now.

‘I haven’t come across any,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Miss Lipscott put them in an out of the way corner and I haven’t turned them up yet.’

‘You mean you haven’t been taking the register?’ said Miss Christopher.

I smiled what I hoped was an ingratiating smile, secretly thinking that I had done rather well getting to Monday evening before my first big gaffe came to light.

‘Oh, I’m sure the other girls would have mentioned it if one of them were missing,’ I said. ‘But that’s even more reason to get my hand on these room lists, Mrs Brown. I’ll make up a register for tomorrow.’

She shared another look with Miss Christopher and Miss Barclay and then jammed her knitting needles into her ball of wool and hauled herself to her feet. As I followed her to the housekeeper’s room I wondered again about Hugh’s jibe. Was there an easier way around this too? Should I have been able to find out where Sabbatina Aldo might be without these convolutions?

Convoluted or not, though, my method worked. Mrs Brown handed over a paper ledger of reddish brown, stuffed with health certificates, notes of doctors’ visits and a plan of the house with the girls’ names printed out in pencil against their dorms.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I shall take very great care of it and return it to you as soon as I can.’ Then I hurried off, already flipping through its pages, and had found ALDER clearly marked against a dorm on the west side of the house before I had turned the first corner.

It was a pleasant enough room. The afternoon sun had warmed it, and with the four bedside lamps lit and a large white radiator emanating more heat it almost managed – linoleum floor and metal bedsteads notwithstanding – not to seem too much like a hospital or (I imagined) a prison. The girls had covered their dresser tops with pictures of their families and pets and on three of the beds there were brightly patterned quilts and coverlets over the brown school blankets. The fourth was covered with a white bedspread of fine pulled stitching, edged with crocheted scallops in wool as light as spiders’ webs; and on it Sabbatina was sitting, the very picture of woe.

‘I came to see if you’re all right,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sabbatina. ‘I’m not.’ And then the tears began to pour out of her, as though pulsing from some internal pump of efficient design, as she hugged herself and rocked back and forth. I sat down beside her and stretched out one hand to rub her back, half-expecting a rebuff. Instead she turned, threw both her arms around my middle, buried her head in my breast and sobbed as though her heart would break, gulping and sniffing and simply howling, on and on.

I had no daughters and my only sister did not particularly like me, so it had been years since someone had engulfed me in a hug and bawled, and Sabbatina Aldo was much bigger than the boys had been the last time they had broken down over the death of a pony or a whipping from Hugh. This was very different and I felt rather panicked as I patted and shushed and smoothed back her masses of hair (this last was not exactly comfort, but more to get it out of my face and stop it tickling me).

‘I know I’ve got to go and live at home now,’ she said eventually, in a voice muffled by being buried against my shirt and made nasal by the inevitable accompaniment to all those tears. ‘But I don’t want to leave St Columba’s. And I don’t want to stay either. I don’t fit anywhere and there’s no one to help me.’ She was seized by another storm of weeping and by the time this one had passed her breath was coming in hiccups.

‘What about your father?’ I said, trying to set her back from me a little without seeming as if I were doing so. Her note had pleaded for permission to visit him. ‘Can’t you and he help one another?’

She did sit up a bit then, and she blinked and sniffed and went searching for a handkerchief to begin to mop herself up.

‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said. ‘Everything’s changed.’

‘Oh, Sabbatina,’ I said. ‘There are always two sides. At least two.’

‘I know I shall have to forgive him in the end but I just can’t imagine it now.’

Which I thought was a bit thick. Joe Aldo was quite the most loving, affectionate and proud husband and father I had ever encountered (certainly I had never seen his like in my own family) and if anyone were to be shunned and then grudgingly forgiven it should be the minx of a wife who had abandoned him and left this poor wretched child to cry herself hoarse with a stranger. Very probably the psychologists could explain the muddle, but it was beyond me.

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘I think the best thing for you to do is work hard at your lessons and visit on Saturday as usual. I mean, not
as usual
, obviously, but . . .’

‘It’s the Saturday after Parents’ Day,’ Sabbatina said, and she started to sniff again. ‘Parents’ Day! They’ll all be here taking the girls out for tea. I wish I could just run away and never come back.’

‘Now, now, don’t even talk about that,’ I said. ‘Gosh, the last thing anyone needs is you running away too. You know how awful it is for those left behind. Hm? Now, promise me?’

She rubbed the tears which had just started to form and fall, and nodded.

‘I promise.’

‘Good girl,’ I said. ‘Now you go and splash your face and clean your teeth and I’ll turn down your bed for you. An early night will do you a world of good.’

‘No!’ said Sabbatina, then she bit her lip. ‘Please don’t— I mean, please don’t take my cover off, Miss Gilver. I’d like to keep it on tonight.’ She had clutched a fold of it in her hand as she spoke but she smoothed it out again now. I smoothed my own hand over it too, studying the tiny stitches and the intricate knots and webs of the pattern, and decided to let her have her way, although it offended every nursery rule ever written not to take off a counterpane at bedtime.

We parted company outside the bathroom door and I descended the nearest staircase, meaning to take the ledger back to Mrs Brown. Finding myself, however, at one end of the corridor leading to the flower room, I decided that instead of risking another trip to fetch Fleur’s bags tomorrow I would go now while the house was quiet. I took a look both ways and then set off on quick light feet with the ledger under my arm and my ear cocked for the sounds of unwanted company.

I met no one on the way, however, and opened the door congratulating myself on the decision. Hugh was quite wrong: I did not make difficulties for myself at all. I closed the door softly, clicked on the electric light and turned around.

The bottom shelf was clear. The bags were gone.

I scanned the shelves and looked behind them, even shifting a few bulky items to make doubly, triply sure. There was no doubt of it, however. They had lain undisturbed since Saturday afternoon and I had had a fine chance to nab them. Stupidly, I had taken the bags which would tell me nothing (the bags of a woman already found) and left those which might yield some clue of the woman vanished. And who had taken them? I had been speaking on the telephone for quite a while, but the Misses Barclay and Christopher had had a very settled look in that staffroom of theirs. Mrs Brown, too: she had got up out of her armchair like the sword from the stone. Ivy Shanks! Of course. She had said she was going to the staffroom, but she was not there. And she had seen me with what she thought was my luggage searching for a place to store it. Perhaps she had only then thought to wonder what had become of Miss Lipscott’s things or the mademoiselle’s.

Then another thought struck me. Had she really believed those bags were mine? Taking my own with me this time, I sped upstairs to my room and shot inside almost expecting that luggage to be gone too. There it was, though, shoved just inside the door where I had left it. I opened my large case – glad now that I could not lift the thing – stowed Jeanne’s more modest-sized one inside it and closed it tight, strapping it and locking it and putting the key in my pocket. I locked her overnight bag in my wardrobe. I smoothed my hair, tried in front of the glass to bring my face back to the look of serenity bordering on weariness that one would get from making up register lists, and headed back to the staffroom with Mrs Brown’s ledger.

She was re-established in her tub chair and her knitting had grown another inch or so. Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher were as they had been too, at either end of their empire sofa, and Miss Shanks had reappeared. She was looking rather ruffled. From exertion, I wondered? From barrelling around the passageways with a heavy bag in each hand? She did not have the build for it. Actually, though, the dominant look about all of them was one of arrested movement; as though they had been stopped short in the midst of some animated exchange.

‘Your ledger, Mrs Brown,’ I said, setting it down again on the table at her elbow. ‘I’ve got my class lists all drawn up now. Thank you.’

‘Have you then?’ said Mrs Brown. ‘Have you indeed?’ She gave quite the most horrible imaginable look out of the corner of her eye towards the other three, sliding her gaze right to the edge of her eye sockets so that only the white showed and not moving her head even an inch.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound offhand. I took a breath to say more.

‘That’s clever of you,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘Seeing as how the forms aren’t listed here.’

I recovered fairly quickly.

‘Well, there are only a hundred, aren’t there? I just made one big alphabetical list and I’ll do the rest with coloured pencil. A code, you know. Yes, a code.’

Mrs Brown raised her eyebrows very slowly until her forehead was a rack of wrinkles, then just as slowly she turned her head and gave a hard stare towards Miss Shanks. Miss Shanks heaved an enormous sigh made up of grievance and self-pity and then plastered a more than usually sickly-sweet smile on her face.

‘I wonder if you would come and have a private word with me, Mrs Gilver,’ she said.

‘Mrs Gilver again, am I?’ I responded, startled.

‘In my office, nice and private,’ said Miss Shanks.

‘Oh Ivy, you’re no fun,’ said Miss Barclay and she gave me a greedy look with an unpleasant reptilian glitter about it.

‘What’s going on?’ I said. I had had a long and exhausting day full of other people’s emotions and perhaps it had worn me out. Certainly I was feeling most peculiar standing here. The way they were all looking at me made me want to feel behind myself for the door handle to be sure that if I had to I could easily get away.

‘What’s going on, she asks!’ said Miss Shanks, with a good measure of glee. ‘Well, you’ve been disappearing, haven’t you? Wandering the village when you should be at prayers, tramping about the countryside instead of supervising prep, you’ve made very free with my telephone and you’ve done a wee bitty too much skulking around the house too.’

‘Not to mention not taking the register,’ put in Miss Christopher.

‘And your discipline in the refectory is abysmal,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Giggling fits from start to finish and you just sit there and let them.’

‘And to cap it all,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘you go drinking in pubs. Don’t think you kept that one quiet.’

‘Rather difficult to keep anything quiet when there’s a member of the Brown family to hand,’ I said coolly. My face did not feel cool, for when they set out my last few days like the sweets stall at a bazaar they made pretty rich pickings.

‘I’ve done a wee tate of checking up on you,’ said Miss Shanks. My heart was hammering now. ‘And do you know what I found?’ I shook my head, dreading the answer.

‘I can’t find the Gilver and Osborne Agency listed anywhere. I rang the number on your wee card and all I got was some hoity-toity fellow-me-lad who wouldn’t give his name and had never heard of it.’

Pallister, I thought, not knowing whether to bless him or curse him. His wilful determination not to countenance the existence of my career had no doubt cost me a case or two in the past (and I thanked the gods that most requests came by written letter) but at least he had not regaled Miss Shanks with the news that Gilver and Osborne were detectives.

‘So we’ve been having a wee confab to ourselves,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘And we reckon you’re no more an English mistress than I’m a kangaroo.’ I kept my gaze level and waited. ‘We reckon you were just chancing your arm slipping in here when you knew your pal was slipping out, looking for a roof over your head and three square meals a day.’ Still, I made my face remain impassive. Was it possible that they had, in Teddy’s phrase, rumbled me as a counterfeit schoolmistress and yet completely missed the truth?

‘So we’re all agreed?’ Miss Barclay said, looking round.

‘I’ve been saying it since Friday,’ said Mrs Brown.

‘We’re all agreed,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We’d like you to leave, Mrs Gilver. Anderson will take your things down to the Crown directly.’

‘What about the girls?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to give them their English lessons?’

‘I’m sure Miss Glennie will oblige,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘And it’s really none of your concern anyway.’

‘So I’m being sacked,’ I said, ‘for using a telephone I was invited to use and for going on walks no one told me not to go on and for spending time in a village inn that you knew I was staying at when you employed me, because you visited me there.’

‘You’re being sacked,’ said Miss Barclay coldly, ‘for perpetrating a fraud.’

‘Och, come on away!’ trilled Miss Shanks. ‘No need to get so het up.’

‘I’ll make my farewell then, ladies,’ I said. ‘I wish you well and give my regards to Miss Lovage and Miss Glennie.’

I bowed my head briefly and left them. Part of me was glad to be released, I thought on my way upstairs again, for now I could investigate the case instead of reading stories with schoolgirls and letting Alec have all the fun. Another part of me, however, could not bear the thought of leaving this strangest of places before I had discovered what was going on here. A third part of me, despite the fact that it was happening with depressing regularity these days, still felt that the touch of a boot to the seat of my skirts made rather a dent in my dignity.

But there was no time to nurse it. Before I left St Columba’s for ever there was something I had to do.