Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (32 page)

There was no point in telephoning to Pearl again to find out any more, I considered, walking with measured pace along one of Stranraer’s main streets. Most assuredly there was no point in telephoning to Aurora. That left Mamma-dearest. Did I dare? She was a woman of fathomless tranquillity and the thought of disturbing it was unpleasant. Besides, if her other two daughters had managed to keep the news from her that Fleur was missing again, I did not relish being its bearer. There was also the consideration that even at my advanced middle age, Mamma-dearest Lipscott – being one of the most striking characters of my youth and never seen again since then – was still ‘one of the grown-ups’ to me. Quite simply, I shrank inside at the prospect of interrogating her, even gently quizzing her, as though she could still if she chose write to my mother to tell of my shortcomings so that the visit was spoiled with the dread of returning home.

To be fair, though, that had never happened at Pereford. I had not given my poor mother a thought the whole summer long, beyond sending her a picture postcard from Watchet and choosing a hideous commemorative china basket of roses with Dorset written on it in loopy gold writing. I do not think that I picked it out deliberately to offend her taste but when I saw her open the tissue-paper package, in her own sitting room surrounded by her hand-hewn oak furniture and her verdigris obelisks, and saw too the sudden wince as though she had bitten down on a boiled sweet with a bad tooth, I knew my mistake. There was no sign of it anywhere when we tidied her things after her death, certainly.

I could not help but contrast Mamma-dearest’s placid adoration of her own children’s efforts; her almost voluptuous joy in the pipe-cleaner and pine-cone families Fleur made for her, the tears she shed over Aurora’s piano-playing, claiming that she had never heard the
Lieder
sound more lovely. When Pearl painted her a watercolour rendition of the Major’s last battle, Mamma-dearest shot to her feet and rang a framer in Weston to get it behind glass immediately for preservation. It was a pitifully amateurish picture too, the paper bubbled with too much water and the bloody battle so tastefully toned down that, if one did not know, one would imagine those men in their bright clothes to be having a round of golf on that green hill. Still, the painting hung in her bedroom, the pine-cone family sat on her writing table and Aurora was invited to play Schubert at every party, while Mamma-dearest sat misty-eyed and seemed not at all to notice the other guests squirming.

I had walked as far as the station, and remembering Signora Aldo’s choice of kiosk from which to inform her husband she had left him, I thought I might as well make use of a telephone there. The privacy at the Crown was far from perfect, between the blackmailing widow, poor Enid at her elbow and the sisters Brown. I went to the newspaper-stand to buy a bar of chocolate and get some change (libraries, where even a peppermint is cardinal sin, always make me ravenously hungry) and then stood in one of the kiosks exhorting myself to courage, practising the opening line and casting around with mounting desperation for an excuse to abandon the plan. The tension was beginning to make my head ache (or perhaps I had tied the scarf over my hair too tightly) and when the operator demanded instructions I heard myself asking, instead, for a trunk call to the Horseshoe.

In the five minutes I was told it would take to string together this inordinately long line of connections, I wandered the station, noting the travellers reeling out of the boat train, still rather green about the gills, and the many passengers who seemed to be arriving with great heaps of luggage to cram onto a short train which sat pawing the ground and ready for the off.

‘You getting on the 10.15, madam?’ said a porter.

‘I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I’m in the minority, eh? Busy little train.’

‘Oh, she’s a wee beauty,’ said the porter. ‘Here to Glasgow for the Flying Scotsman.’

‘The Flying Scotsman starts at Edinburgh, doesn’t it?’ I said. This was one of things one knew about the railway even if one knew nothing else. The Flying Scotsman left King’s Cross at ten in the morning and left Edinburgh Waverley at one in the afternoon.

‘She does not!’ said the porter. ‘The Flying Scotsman starts in the fair city of Glasgow. Edinburgh is just one o’ the stops.’

‘Golly,’ I said. I had never known a porter so bursting with pride, and although I had no luggage and was not even boarding, I tipped him for his sheer
joie de vivre
. Then I checked the platform clock – it was just gone ten and my five minutes’ wait was up – and returned to the kiosk.

‘You sound as though you’re in a barrel of nails, Dandy,’ said Alec’s voice. ‘What a terrible line. Where are you?’

‘Stranraer station,’ I said. ‘Yes, you’re a bit gravelly too. How did it go?’

Alec began a tale which reached my ears as a series of clicks and buzzes with the odd word sticking up out of the noise like church spires in a low fog.

‘No use, darling,’ I said. ‘I can’t hear you. I said, I can’t hear you!’

There were more clicks and buzzes and all I heard was my name.

‘This is pointless,’ I bellowed into the mouthpiece and then some kind of madness came over me, I think. I slammed down the telephone (such an ungrateful wretch after the exchange had put the connection together for me so quickly), glanced at the clock – ten past ten – and went to seek my porter friend again.

By
fifteen
minutes past ten, I had sent another telegram to the Horseshoe with detailed instructions of what I wanted Alec to do, purchased a ticket, asked the Crown to hold my room and was sitting in the last first-class seat in the only first-class carriage on the little train, with the fire dying down to grey embers in my belly and the list of essential items I did not have with me growing in my head. Hairbrush, toothbrush, underclothes, warm coat, the comfort of knowing that my husband knew where I was and what I was doing, the comfort of knowing myself why I was doing this . . . What I
did
have was an almost new notebook, a couple of sharp pencils and hours and hours of luxurious time to organise my thoughts and discoveries so that I could fathom out this maddening case before its waters met over my head and it drowned me.

When I stuck my head out of the window at York where we had a half-hour break for tea, Alec hailed me in great high spirits, waving a brown paper bag at me like a backbencher with his ballot papers.

‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘Hello, darling.’

‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘Toothbrush, toothpaste and a few delicate garments I got in a ladies’ outfitters.’

‘You went into a ladies’ outfitters and rifled through—’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I just murmured to the girl in the shop – something about my wife’s lost luggage, you know – and she picked everything for you. No idea what size, though. I said you were “average”.’

‘How flattering,’ I said. ‘Hairbrush?’

‘Ah,’ said Alec. ‘Well, you can borrow one of mine.’

‘And Nanny Palmer turns in her grave once again. But thank you, thank you and a thousand times thank you. Now we can use our teatime to have some tea.’

‘Better tea on the train,’ said Alec, displaying yet again the new concern with his own stomach which had been so very much to the fore in Joe Aldo’s and at the Horseshoe.

‘But at such close quarters one can’t talk freely,’ I said. ‘Come on, to the platform buffet with you and then we can go straight to the smoking lounge when the train sets off.’

We found a quiet table (or what passes for one amidst the hiss and clatter of the tea-making and plate-clearing which always go on apace in these settings) and over strong Indian and a plate of buns, I tried to explain to him what had come over me.

‘Demob fever after being sacked, perhaps. It’s lucky I’m not sitting on a sailor’s lap drinking stout from the bottle. No, in all seriousness, I think Pearl is too much of a hard nut for us ever to crack her. You possibly went a little tiny bit too far the other way with Aurora. So like Goldilocks we need to try the third one and steer a middle course. And I need to go back to Pereford where it all began. Something happened there, Alec, to turn Fleur from the child she was into the girl who became the woman she is now. And Mamma— Mrs Lipscott doesn’t know she’s missing. Pearl and Aurora are protecting her from the pain of it.’

‘But you think the pain might be useful if it joggles her into an explanation?’

‘Rather a brutal way to put it but . . . yes. Now, tell me about Taylor and Bell. I didn’t catch more than one word in ten on that nasty trunk line.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Alec. ‘Well, I’m more than happy to have done with the dread contraption for a while myself, actually, because I was fairly finely grated by various parties this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘I tried Lambourne first. Charming enough to bring the birds down out of the trees, if I say so myself, and got short shrift. I reminded the girl who answered the telephone that she had helped me earlier with Miss Blair and I asked – all chummy: I even remembered her name, which was Beverley – if she could work her magic again and put me in touch with the other two. She instructed me to wait and the next thing I knew some dragon was breathing fire down the line, demanding to know who I was and what I was up to and whether I wanted the police after me.’

‘Really?’ I said, arrested with a bite of bun halfway to my mouth. It fell off my fork and landed icing side down on the doily. ‘Why the dramatic change?’

‘I think Beverley must have casually mentioned my first enquiry and the dragon knows more about what’s going on at St Columba’s than she wants anyone else to find out.’

‘You could be right, you know,’ I said. ‘Miss Glennie did say that Lambourne positively courted her. That’s not how scholastic agencies usually go on.’

‘I suppose not. So Beverley must have been well warned what to do if I ever rang again and she did it.’

‘So what did
you
do?’

‘Well, in for a penny in for a pound. I just plunged on and asked the dragon about Taylor and Bell anyway – hoping she’d say something useful if I rattled her – and I told her I didn’t mind if she called the police. In fact, maybe
I’d
call them to see if they could help me. And guess what?’

‘I give up.’

‘She slammed the telephone down. And when I got the girl to try the number again it was engaged and it stayed engaged from then until I left the Horseshoe.’

‘Hmph. So Taylor and Bell remain a mystery. Oh well.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ Alec said. ‘I did as you suggested, Dan, and got on to Somerville College. Stirred up a secretary.’

‘In a falsetto voice?’ I asked. ‘Pretending to be an old girl? I wish I’d been there to hear it.’

Alec blew a raspberry at me, attracting the glaring attention of a very respectable family at the next table who were eating ham and eggs as though stoking a boiler for a cold winter’s night.

‘No, I said I was writing an article on pioneering female scholars for a scientific journal and I particularly wished to speak to any of their early scientists.’

‘Which one was the science mistress?’

‘Tinker Bell,’ said Alec. ‘Do you know that was her nickname at Somerville too? So I was expecting some delicate little thing. Her voice down the line when I finally got through to her almost knocked me flat. I haven’t heard a pair of lungs like it since a fairground tout who made me drop my lolly when I was six.’

‘Down the line?’ I said. ‘You mean you actually spoke to her?’

‘And she’s still good pals with Miss Taylor too,’ said Alec, with a triumphant wiggle of his eyebrows. ‘But look, let’s powder our noses and get back on board, eh? I’ll tell you everything else on the way to London.’

‘Everything else’, though, did not get us much past the northern suburbs of Doncaster. We chose the smoking lounge in hopes of finding fewer ladies in there and in recognition of the shaming fact that gentlemen are less interested in others’ concerns and would not listen, and were so lucky as to find no ladies at all and only two gentlemen, both at one end of the car, both elderly, both reading, and both swaying with the movement of the train in a way that suggested they would soon be asleep. We settled ourselves into armchairs at the other end. Alec rummaged in his pocket and drew out not the usual equipment but a paper bag which he held out to me.

‘Pontefract cake?’ he said.

‘I’ve just eaten a bun,’ I replied. ‘And you ate two!’

‘They’re not really cakes,’ said Alec. ‘Pastilles, liquorice. A local delicacy. I got them while skulking outside your underclothes shop.’

I glanced at the two gentlemen but they were paying no attention.

‘Not bad,’ I said, tentatively rolling a pastille around my mouth. ‘Now, Alec, what of your two mistresses?’

At that, I rather thought one of the old gentlemen
did
stir. Laughing gently, Alec resumed his report.

‘Miss Bell is at St Leonards now,’ he said. ‘The secretary at Somerville was quite happy to tell me, and I caught her between breakfast and chapel which was handy.’

‘St Leonards, eh?’ I said. ‘Pretty hot stuff then, this Miss Bell. What was she doing in Portpatrick in the first place, one wonders?’

‘One wouldn’t have to if one would shut up and listen,’ said Alec. ‘She and Miss Fielding and Miss Taylor were at Somerville together.’

‘We knew that.’

‘And she and Miss Taylor agreed to join the staff of Miss Fielding’s new enterprise . . . not quite for old times’ sake, but certainly not for the advancement of their careers. The way she spoke made it sound like a kindness to an old friend.’

‘Quite a considerable kindness,’ I said. ‘How long would they have stuck it if Miss Fielding hadn’t died?’

‘Who can say, but Miss Taylor has returned to academia proper since she left St Columba’s. She’s currently in Greece getting excited about the deflation of the coinage in the ancient empire.’

‘Takes all kinds,’ I said. ‘So they what? They felt their loyalty was to Miss Fielding personally and dropped poor Ivy Shanks like a brick after the funeral tea?’

‘Again, if you would let me tell you,’ Alec said. ‘No. At least, they might have felt that way but they are both women of the stoutest ethical fibre and they would certainly have devoted as much more time as was wanted.’